Petraeus and Crocker: The Best of Their Generation
The performances of four-star General David Petraeus and Career Ambassador Ryan Crocker before Congress recently were startling for a number of reasons. First, Petraeus, the administration point man for the conduct of the war in Iraq, explicitly denied that his remarks had been even reviewed in advance by anyone above him in the military and civilian chain of command, much less cleared, before he presented them to the U.S. Congress. The White House, in effect, was not in the loop in his Congressional testimony. Second, neither Petraeus nor Crocker “promised” the American people victory in Iraq or suggested that it was even probable; the most they offered was that it was “attainable.” Third, after four and a half years of a war that has become increasingly unpopular in the U.S., here was a fighting general from that war on Capitol Hill being almost mobbed by Senators and Members of Congress who were climbing over each other to shake his hand. Fourth, after four and a half years in which the entire Iraq War has become intensely political, the key figures speaking about it to the American people were not politicians at all, but career professionals: one in the military, one in the Foreign Service.
Petraeus, of course, was by far the more prominent of the two. He arrived in Washington aboard a military transport plane accompanied by large numbers of impressive-looking, high-ranking military aides. By contrast, Crocker flew back to the U.S. aboard a commercial airliner, where State Department travel rules grudgingly permitted him to fly business class.
But where the two men were startlingly similar was in the outstanding quality of their professional attainments. Quite simply, Petraeus and Crocker constitute the best professionals in their fields of their generation.
Petraeus was conventional enough in the first stages of his career: the top 5 percent of his West Point class of 1974, then a rising officer in mechanized infantry units. But he seemed to have a highly developed academic streak. He graduated top of his class in the 1983 U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, at Fort Leavenworth, KS, then in 1985 and 1987 respectively gained an MPA and later a Ph.D. at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Petraeus’s dissertation topic was “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: a Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the post-Vietnam Era.” The possession of Ph.D.s by American generals is not entirely unique, but it is certainly rare. It is even rarer that a general should have studied counter-insurgency at such a high academic level and then have an opportunity of putting into practice the lessons he learned in his studies.
The year 1985 must have been interesting at Princeton. Also attending the university then under U.S. State Department auspices was rising foreign service professional Ryan Crocker. It is not known whether Crocker and Petraeus ever met during their coincidental studying at Princeton. Crocker was taking courses in Near Eastern Studies, though he was already an American diplomat with seasoned Middle East experience. After joining the Foreign Service in 1971 on graduating from Whitman College, he underwent Persian language training and was assigned to a consular post in Iran—at the time, of course, still ruled by the Shah. After a brief stint in Qatar as an economic officer, he went through an intensive, twenty-month Arabic language program in Washington, DC and Tunis before being assigned to Baghdad in the late 1970s (when Saddam Hussein was consolidating his power in that country), Beirut (as chief of the political section when the embassy was bombed), and following the Princeton stint, a tour in Cairo. His rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in the Foreign Service, was conferred upon him by President Bush in 2004.
What an extraordinary combination of talent: a commanding general with a Ph.D. in counter-insurgency doctrine, now fighting a war against urban guerrillas, and an American ambassador fluent in Arabic and Persian, directing American policy in an Arab country where he had served as a diplomat under the former regime. After a few years when U.S. ambassadorships have often been filled by political friends of presidents whose only known talents seemed to have been political loyalty and raising campaign funds, the presence of Ryan Crocker in Baghdad is nothing short of a miracle of inspired personnel selection. Crocker and Petraeus are, quite simply, the very best this nation could produce, in a situation where their talents will be tested to the limit.
What is unfortunate for the U.S. is that it took four years of less than stellar U.S. military and diplomatic performance in Iraq before this talent was deployed. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld presided over a U.S. military operation in Iraq that was woefully inadequate in its preparations for the post-military occupation and almost dogmatic about limiting troop numbers when more and more observers were arguing that the U.S. force-level was inadequate. Perhaps worse, by not resigning after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in 2004, Rumsfeld made the Bush administration appear to treat lightly what was arguably the most serious blow to American global prestige since the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968. (Some have argued that Rumsfeld offered to resign but that Bush insisted he stay.`) One of the aphorisms about war is that it is “too serious to be left to the generals.” One of the truths, surely, to emerge from the war in Iraq is that the conduct of a war is sometimes too difficult to be left in the hands of civilians.
Neither of the two best professionals of their generation (Crocker was born in 1949 and Petraeus in 1952) can bring success to the U.S. effort in Iraq if the Iraqi government proves unable to make progress at sectarian reconciliation and taking over security duties in the country from the Americans. Certainly, neither can probably do much to repair the political damage that the Bush administration has suffered domestically from the struggle in Iraq. But it is to the administration’s credit that these two men have been allowed to rise to the top at a time of crisis. Their skills have never been more sorely needed.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Good and Evil, Religious Liberty, War and Peace, Thu 20 Sep 2007
