Word: iraqi
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...blistering June Saturday in Yusufia, just south of Baghdad. The abandoned school was stifling, though more tolerable than the dusty, sun-addled main street of town, which we'd just walked along - the general on an arid grip-and-grin tour, offering Salaam aleikum, habibi! greetings to the few Iraqis willing to brave the midday heat. Now Petraeus moved from classroom to classroom, cloaked in heavy body armor, sweat trickling down the side of his face. Each room was packed with nonsmiling Iraqi men in deep squat - 500 in all. Petraeus was exhilarated. They were different from the usual police...
...optimism," Petraeus told me as he watched the recruits being fingerprinted and getting retinal scans for their ID cards. "This is the wave of the future. You've got to work from the bottom up, get the local forces involved." The biometric scans were a major technological advance. The Iraqi police had a reputation for corruption and secret allegiance to the militias, but the allegiances of these men were not going to be secret. If any of those fingerprints turned up on a bomb, the culprit would be identified. "We're beginning to build a fairly significant database," Petraeus said...
...This is one of his favorite themes - how much more knowledgeable the U.S. military is about Iraq now than when he first came over with the Operation Iraqi Freedom invasion force in 2003. Earlier, I sat next to the general at a briefing staged by U.S. officers at Fire Base Yusufia, and he whispered little addendums for my benefit. "See, these guys really get it," he told me as a major explained the nuances of a map showing the various local tribal areas. When the briefer showed a map of joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol bases, Petraeus said...
...decisive phase," a member of Petraeus' staff told me and began to laugh. "That's one of our favorite jokes. It's always a decisive phase. But this time, I guess you'd have to say, it actually is." Operation Phantom Thunder, the nationwide offensive launched by U.S. and Iraqi troops in mid-June, may well be the last major U.S-led offensive of the war. "We couldn't really call it what it is, Operation Last Chance," says a senior military official. There is widespread awareness among the military and diplomatic players in Baghdad that, with patience dwindling in Washington...
...intellectual, a West Point graduate with a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton. His record in Iraq has been mixed. He succeeded, for a time, in applying his counterinsurgency tactics in Mosul during the first year of the war, but his highly publicized effort to train the new Iraqi army in 2004 can only be considered a failure. He has successfully led soldiers in combat. And he does have his macho moments, famously challenging his soldiers to push-up contests. But he made his reputation more as a communicator and motivator than as a warrior. "He is very much...