Word: petraeus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...counterinsurgency warfare. It is not about protecting a population but about attacking a historically elusive enemy. This is not so easily done in Iraq. On the second day of Phantom Thunder, I flew into Baqubah with Lieut. General Ray Odierno - a massive man, decidedly more blood-and-guts than Petraeus - to check the progress of what was supposed to be the most intense, and symbolic, battle of the offensive. In 2006 al-Qaeda's leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi proclaimed Baqubah the capital of the new Islamic State of Iraq. About 500 al-Qaeda fighters were said...
...your foot in a puddle, the water splashes out," Petraeus' chief counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen said. "The important thing is to secure the neighborhoods they've left." But the puddle analogy wasn't quite right. This puddle had evaporated and would undoubtedly condense somewhere else in Iraq. There simply aren't enough troops to police the entire country...
...Soon after arriving in Iraq, Petraeus invented a formulation that has since become a cliché: the disparity between the two "clocks" - Washington and Baghdad time - for ending the war. The Washington clock is "late fourth quarter, we're down a touchdown, and the other team has the ball," a senior Administration official told me. Petraeus knows that the American public is tired of the war - tired of not winning it, at least - and that a significant chunk of the Republicans in Congress may be about to abandon President Bush, as the respected Senator Richard Lugar did on June...
...There is another clock, not often mentioned, that sits in the Pentagon. It is the Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. "It would be a last resort," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters - but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to "get the word out" to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false...
...Broken Army clock, troop levels will begin to wane in March 2008, no matter what Congress decides in September; the current 20 brigade combat teams will be reduced to 15 by August 2008. There is growing speculation in the military that Bush will try to pre-empt the Petraeus testimony by announcing a gradual drawdown from 20 to 15 combat brigades later this summer. "As if that isn't going to happen anyway," a senior officer told me. "But it may give us some political breathing space" - that is, it may subvert the Democrats' calls for a more rapid withdrawal...