“You Now Stand among the Giants”

When David Petraeus took over in 2007 as the leading American general in Iraq, he had already served one year as a commander in northern Iraq and another as the head of the campaign to train Iraqi security forces. The journalist Greg Jaffe, who accompanied the American general at the time, concluded that Petraeus’s knowledge of Iraq was “astonishing.” On any given morning, Petraeus might investigate the status of a neighborhood bank that the Shiite-controlled Finance Ministry had closed to punish Sunnis. A moment later, he would inquire about a downed electrical transmission tower outside of Baghdad or the status of an Iraqi commander he was eager to replace. As one observer commented, “Petraeus understood Iraq from the most granular level to the most strategic. . . . He was monumentally well-prepared for that job.”

Three years later, Petraeus moved from Iraq to Afghanistan, replacing General Stanley McChrystal as top American commander after McChrystal was swiftly dismissed by President Obama after a bombshell article in Rolling Stone magazine quoted the American general and his staff being highly critical of White House officials. In Afghanistan, Petraeus often briefed reporters using a PowerPoint slide that illustrated his “Anaconda strategy,” which in Iraq had entailed a relentless combination of military, economic, and political campaigns to annihilate the Islamic insurgency. In fact, while he readily admitted the two countries were different, Petraeus apparently talked with such fervor about his Iraq experience to make points about the best approach in Afghanistan that he drew eye rolls from seasoned Afghan hands.