The big test for David Petraeus

Dexter Filkins has a front-pager in today’s New York Times on the challenges facing Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus (about whom I’ve blogged here, here, and here) in reconstituting Iraq’s security forces. The highlights:

The magnitude of the task that confronts General Petraeus was made clear two months ago, when revolts in Falluja and in cities across southern Iraq led to the widespread collapse of the 200,000-man, American-trained Iraqi security forces. The uprisings were eventually brought under control, but the Iraqi forces hardly played a role. In Baghdad, half of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a national militia trained by the Americans, either quit or sided with the insurgents; in Karbala, the corps disintegrated entirely. In Falluja, when American commanders ordered Iraqi soldiers into battle, they mutinied, with some 200 armed Iraqis refusing to board American helicopters. Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi forces until General Petraeus took over earlier this month, said the Americans tried to do much too fast, and missed the degree to which the country’s various ethnicities and religious groups had failed to jell into a coherent nation. “In America, we have this national ethos; you identify with the Pledge of Allegiance and the flag, the stars and stripes,” General Eaton said. “In Iraq, that is overshadowed by tribe, imam, family and ethnicity. I talked to countless young soldiers who said, `My name is Muhammad, and I am a Turkoman’ or `I am a Sunni’ or `I am a Shiite.’ ” General Petraeus acknowledges the obstacles but believes he can transcend them. A 1974 graduate of West Point, he is a veteran of operations in Haiti and Bosnia, but not in a combat zone until he came to Iraq last year. He has a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University, where he wrote his dissertation on the lessons of the Vietnam War….. Even before General Petraeus arrived, American commanders had already begun a vast overhaul of the Iraqi security services, based on the experience of the April uprisings. With the new Iraqi leadership, they have taken the country’s most important internal security unit, the civil defense corps, and begun turning it into a branch of a revamped 100,000-man Iraqi Army. The locally recruited corps officers will be taken out of their homes and cities, away from their families and tribes and mosques, and turned into regular soldiers who live on bases and train and fight together. To make that happen, the Americans have committed $3 billion to building training sites and regional headquarters and to better equip Iraqi soldiers….. To set up an effective Iraqi Army, General Petraeus believes that the most important change is already happening — putting Iraqis in charge of the army and the government. Part of the problem last April, he acknowledged, was not just that Iraqi soldiers were refusing to fight other Iraqis, it was that the people who were ordering them to do so were Americans. To that end, the Americans have installed a veteran Iraqi general, with a history of independence from Saddam Hussein, as the army chief of staff. Already, that general, Amir Hashemi, said he had found the America training of Iraqi troops to be woefully inadequate. “I am not satisfied with the training provided by the Americans,” General Hashemi said. “We must do this the Iraqi way.” General Petraeus says he is cheered by that kind of independence, since it is the Iraqis, ultimately, who will have to do the fighting. Yet at the same time, General Petraeus is trying to impart Western notions on the armed forces here, particularly the idea that the army, and the Iraqi nation, must transcend loyalties to tribe and religion. “This is your new tribe,” he said to an Iraqi soldier, an ethnic Kurd, who stood in line as General Petraeus inspected the troops. “These are all your new brothers,” he said to another.

Developing…. UPDATE: Petraeus and Hashemi might want to peruse Michael Ware’s essay in Time about the make-up of the Iraqi insurgency. The opening graf:

The safe house lies on the outskirts of Fallujah in a neighborhood where no Americans have ventured. Inside, a group of Arab sheiks has gathered to discuss the jihad they and their followers are waging against the U.S. The men wear white robes and long beards and greet each other solemnly. They are all Iraqi, but their beliefs are those of the strict Wahhabi strain of Islam repressed under Saddam Hussein. Unlike most Iraqi sitting rooms, this one has no pictures adorning its walls or a television or radio nestled in a corner. Such luxuries are forbidden, just as they were under the Taliban in Afghanistan. At the back of the room are a few men from Saudi Arabia, who stand silently as one of the sheiks, the group’s leader, addresses me in Arabic and stilted English. The war in Iraq, he says, is one of liberation, not just of a country but of Muslim lands, Muslim people, Islam itself. There is no room for negotiation with the enemy, no common ground. What he and his men offer is endless, righteous resistance. “Maybe this war will take a long time,” he says. “Maybe this is a world war.”

Read the whole thing. ANOTHER UPDATE: Edward Cody’s Washington Post front-pager today encapsulates the battle currently being waged in Iraq between the forces of nationalism and the forces of Islamic radicalism:

Key Iraqi opponents of the U.S. occupation expressed unease Friday over the wave of insurgent attacks that killed more than 100 Iraqis a day earlier, and rejected efforts by foreign guerrillas to take the lead in the insurgency and mate it with the international jihad advocated by Osama bin Laden. The objections — from anti-U.S. Shiite and Sunni Muslim leaders, including rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr, and even from militia fighters in the embattled city of Fallujah — arose in part from revulsion at the fact that victims of the car bombings and guerrilla assaults in six cities and towns Thursday were overwhelmingly Iraqis. But they also betrayed Iraqi nationalist concerns that the fight against U.S. occupation forces risked being hijacked by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian whom U.S. officials describe as a paladin in bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. “We do not need anyone from outside the borders to stand with us and spill the blood of our sons in Iraq,” Ahmed Abdul Ghafour Samarrae, a Sunni cleric with a wide following, declared in his Friday sermon at Umm al Qurra mosque in Baghdad. Since they were appointed three weeks ago, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and members of his U.S.-sponsored interim government have railed against the car bombings and other attacks. But Friday’s show of disgust — expressed in mosques and, in Sadr’s case, with fliers calling for cooperation with Iraqi police — marked the first time anti-occupation clerics and fighters sided against violence associated with the insurgency, for which Zarqawi has increasingly asserted responsibility. In that light, it could be an important moment in the U.S. struggle to win acceptance for the military occupation and for the interim government scheduled to acquire limited authority next Wednesday. While far from embracing the U.S. occupation or the new government, the anti-occupation leaders seemed to disavow the bloodiest edge of the violence and Zarqawi’s attempt to make it part of al Qaeda’s vision of international jihad.