Iran's Guards: We'll 'Punch' US

Aug 18 05:41 AM US/Eastern
By NASSER KARIMI
Associated Press Writer

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards said they would not bow to pressure and threatened to "punch" the U.S., in their first response to Washington's plan to list them as a terrorist organization, newspapers reported Saturday.
Local press in the Iranian capital of Tehran quoted Revolutionary Guards leader Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi saying that he could understand Washington's ire toward the group because of their "leverage" against the U.S.

"America will receive a heavier punch from the guards in the future," he was quoted as saying in the conservative daily Kayhan. "We will never remain silent in the face of U.S. pressure and we will use our leverage against them."

There was no elaboration on what Safavi meant by the punch or the organization's "leverage."

Washington has accused the Guards of supporting militias and insurgent groups attacking U.S. forces in Iraq—charges Iran denies.

The fact that the remarks, made on Thursday in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, appeared in local newspapers rather than the official state news outlets suggest the comments are for domestic consumption.

Meanwhile, other Iranian officials continued to speak out against Washington's move to register the group as a terrorist organization, with a government spokesman calling the claims "baseless," on the Web site of the state broadcasting company.

"The claims of the U.S. are baseless and have no takers around the world," he said Saturday, noting that "the U.S. has endangered the world many times under the excuse of fighting against terrorism."

On Tuesday, an unnamed official in the Bush administration said the U.S. planned to list the Guards as terrorist group in order to squeeze Iran.

The move was seen as an effort to pressure businesses the corps is thought to control, from construction to oil sectors. It would be the first time the U.S. would put a foreign government's military agency on the list, which includes the al-Qaida network and the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

Iranian armed forces spokesman Gen. Ali Reza Afshar hit out precisely against this attempt to declare a state body terrorist in an editorial Saturday in the country's largest circulation newspaper, calling it illegal.

"America's long time hostility against the Guard is clear and understandable, but this move against organization that is part of Iran's armed forces is illegal," he wrote in the daily Hamshahri.

The estimated 200,000-strong Revolutionary Guards is an elite force separate from Iran's regular military and has its own ground, naval and air units.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

August 19, 2007
Falluja Fears for Life After Marines

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
FALLUJA, Iraq — Falluja’s police chief, Col. Faisal Ismail Hussein, waved aloft a picture of a severed head in a bucket as a reminder of the brutality of the fundamentalist Sunni militias that once controlled this city. But he also described an uncertain future without “my only supporters,” the United States Marine Corps.

Nearly three years after invading and seizing Falluja from insurgents, the Marines are engaged in another struggle here: trying to build up a city, and police force, that seem to get little help from the Shiite-dominated national government.

Fallujans complain that they are starved of generator fuel and medical care because of a citywide vehicle ban imposed by the mayor, a Sunni, in May. But in recent months violence has fallen sharply, a byproduct of the vehicle ban, the wider revolt by Sunni Arab tribes against militants and a new strategy by the Marines to divide Falluja into 10 tightly controlled precincts, each walled off by concrete barriers and guarded by a new armed Sunni force.

Security has improved enough that they are planning to largely withdraw from the city by next spring. But their plan hinges on the performance of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, which has failed to provide the Falluja police with even the most routine supplies, Marine officers say.

The improved security in Falluja, neighboring Ramadi and other areas in Anbar Province, once the most violent area in Iraq and the heart of the Sunni Arab insurgency, is often touted as a success story, a possible model for the rest of Iraq. But interviews with marines and Iraqi officials in Falluja suggest that the recent relative calm here is fragile and that the same sectarian rivalries that have divided the Iraqi government could undermine security as soon as the Marines leave.

Some rank-and-file marines question how security forces here would fare on their own, especially when the vehicle ban is lifted.

If Falluja were left unsupervised too soon, “there is a good chance we would lose everything we have gained,” said Sgt. Chris Turpin, an intelligence analyst with a military training team here.

Marine commanders emphasize there is no hard-and-fast date for leaving the city. “A lot of people say that without the Americans it’s all going to collapse,” said Col. Richard Simcock, the commander of Marine Regimental Combat Team Six in eastern Anbar. “I’m not that negative. I’ve seen too much success here to believe that.”

Most of the fuel, ammunition and vehicle maintenance for the Falluja police is still supplied by the American military, said Maj. Todd Sermarini, the Marine officer in charge of police training here.

Some police officers have been forced to buy gasoline from black-market roadside vendors. “Ammunition is a big problem, weapons are a problem, and wages are a problem,” said Capt. Al Cheng, 34, a company commander working with the police here.

Many Sunni leaders here contend that the Shiite-dominated government is neglecting them for sectarian reasons, and the bad feelings at times boil over into angry accusations. In interviews conducted in early August some said that factions in the Interior Ministry were taking orders from Iran, or that the government was withholding money and support because it did not want to build up Sunni security forces that it could end up fighting after an eventual American withdrawal from Iraq.

Iraqi officials in Baghdad deny shortchanging Falluja, saying they have authorized more than enough police forces for Anbar. “We’d like to support them, but that does not mean we can respond to their requests or demands,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, political adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. He said the government had problems supplying the police throughout Iraq.

The Marines operate as a “shock absorber” between the locals and the central government, said Brig. Gen. John Allen, the deputy Marine commander in Anbar Province. The animosity toward Baghdad among the Sunnis here “worries me, but I don’t despair of it,” he said, adding that he thought the government’s lack of support was more the result of bureaucratic inefficiency than sectarian hostility. “The challenge for us is to connect the province to the central government.”

But first, marines in Falluja have to connect residents with their own police force. On a recent weekend, that involved establishing a joint American-Iraqi security outpost in Andalus, one of the city’s worst neighborhoods, where the pockmarked buildings still bear the scars of the 2004 American assault.

In just 24 hours, marines cut enough electrical cable and plywood to turn a shell of a building into a functioning outpost, one of the 10 they are building, one for each precinct, and to wall off the precinct behind concrete barriers, leaving just a few ways in or out.

The next step was to recruit an auxiliary force to help the police. After careful screening, they hired 200 Iraqis to serve in a neighborhood watch for the precinct, part of an effort to bolster the undersized force of slightly more than 1,000 police officers for the city and surrounding area. The members of the new force are paid $50 a month by the Marines to stand guard — mostly at checkpoints at the entrances to the neighborhood — with weapons they bring from home, typically AK-47s.

Seven of the city’s 10 precincts have now gotten the same treatment as Andalus. The idea behind the outposts was to roust the Iraqi police from their central headquarters, which they seldom left, and get them into the neighborhood outposts.

The new plan makes it easier for marines to act as mentors for the police officers, whose heavy-handed tactics are a continuing concern. The police need to learn not to arrest “a hundred people” for a single crime, Colonel Simcock said. “What’s going to stop Al Qaeda is not having 99 people angry at the police because they were wrongfully arrested,” he said.

Despite the marines’ best efforts to screen recruits, Captain Cheng said, “it wouldn’t surprise me that a lot of the guys we used to fight are in the neighborhood watch.” But he says the new force has already made a difference, turning in active insurgents and guarding precincts that have only 10 or 20 police officers on patrol at any one time.

Captain Cheng says the plan to turn Falluja’s security over to the police is on track, but he points out how much the marines still do. “We are the ones emplacing the barriers, we are the ones hiring the neighborhood watch,” he said. “We are the ones establishing the conditions for them to succeed.”

Violence has dropped sharply in the city, where no marines have been killed or wounded since mid-May. But deadly skirmishes have been common around the nearby village of Karma and in remote areas north of Falluja. Twenty-five service members have been killed in Anbar Province since the beginning of July, according to Icasualties.org, making it by far the deadliest province after Baghdad.

The struggle to supply the police overshadows another important element in the American military’s gains in Anbar: contracts awarded to Sunni tribal allies in rural areas.

The tribes have relatively little influence in Falluja but dominate elsewhere in the province. Their decision to ally with the Marines helped stabilize the entire region, and men from tribes now serve in provincial security forces to help keep insurgents at bay.

One Marine civil affairs officer estimates that a quarter of the $10 million his unit has committed to spending around Falluja since March has gone to the Abu Issa tribe, which is centered in the areas west of Falluja. Another tribe, the Jumaili, near Karma, has received about $1 million, the officer said. The contracts are typically for water treatment plants, refurbishing clinics and similar projects.

“The politics here are very much governed by greed, and this is the real alliance in Anbar,” said an American reconstruction official here who worries the contracts are only a temporary glue with the tribes and who was not authorized to speak publicly. If the Iraqi government provided more, “everything would be much more sustainable.”

The last security outpost is scheduled to be finished in September, followed by four new police stations scattered throughout the city. If all goes as planned, the marines should begin leaving the city early next year, said Lt. Col. Bill Mullen, who commands the Second Battalion, Sixth Marines, the unit that patrols Falluja.

In effect, the Marines are predicting they can leave Falluja on the same timeline many in Congress want to see troops pulled back to larger bases or leaving altogether. Troops who would have patrolled Falluja would deploy into outlying areas by April, but close enough to reinforce the city in a crisis, Colonel Mullen said. Small police training and liaison teams would also remain.

“Everything we are doing is oriented toward our ability to leave,” he said, adding that the most likely obstacle to leaving by April would be the continued failure of the Interior Ministry to supply the police. “You can’t help hearing stuff going on back in the United States, and Congress reaching for the chain to pull the plug out of the bathtub. The smart money says there is finite time.”

The Iraqi Army has already been pulling out of Falluja. The last battalion is scheduled to leave in September. Though the marines here say the Iraqi soldiers were a good unit, there has been tension between the police and the soldiers, who one marine commander said were 90 percent Shiite. Marines say guns-drawn confrontations have occurred, though none recently.

The tensions briefly boiled over on a recent joint patrol through Andalus, when the police accused Iraqi soldiers of stealing blankets from large bags of supplies being handed to residents from the back of trucks.

As people from the neighborhood looked on, the soldiers accused the police of being “moles” and “spies” for insurgents, and the Iraqi Army commander shouted and shook his finger in the faces of policemen. The police shouted back, accusing the soldiers of serving as Iranian agents. Afterward, the police and army commanders calmed down their troops and shook hands.

If the Iraqi government provided a large and steady supply of men, weapons, vehicles and equipment, the police could secure the city, said Colonel Hussein, the Falluja police chief. But he complained of little support from the government except for salaries, which he doubted would be paid if the Americans were not here. He said he also needed four times more policemen. “Without the role of the Marines, I’ll fail,” he said.

Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, a senior Interior Ministry spokesman, called Colonel Hussein’s comments “unprofessional.” In an interview, he said if the Falluja police had an equipment shortage then they failed to request enough gear earlier.

He added that if Colonel Hussein is so fond of the Marines, perhaps he should apply for American citizenship.

Wisam A. Habeeb and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi contributed reporting from Baghdad.

An Early Clash Over Iraq Report
Specifics at Issue as September Nears
By Jonathan Weisman and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 16, 2007; A01

Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush administration's progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the secretaries of state and defense.

White House officials did not deny making the proposal in informal talks with Congress, but they said yesterday that they will not shield the commanding general in Iraq and the senior U.S. diplomat there from public congressional testimony required by the war-funding legislation President Bush signed in May. "The administration plans to follow the requirements of the legislation," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in response to questions yesterday.

The skirmishing is an indication of the rising anxiety on all sides in the remaining few weeks before the presentation of what is widely considered a make-or-break assessment of Bush's war strategy, and one that will come amid rising calls for a drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq.

With the report due by Sept. 15, officials at the White House, in Congress and in Baghdad said that no decisions have been made on where, when or how Petraeus and Crocker will appear before Congress. Lawmakers from both parties are growing worried that the report -- far from clarifying the United States' future in Iraq -- will only harden the political battle lines around the war.

White House officials suggested to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week that Petraeus and Crocker would brief lawmakers in a closed session before the release of the report, congressional aides said. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would provide the only public testimony.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) told the White House that Bush's presentation plan was unacceptable. An aide to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said that "we are in talks with the administration and . . . Senator Levin wants an open hearing" with Petraeus.

Those positions only hardened yesterday with reports that the document would not be written by the Army general but instead would come from the White House, with input from Petraeus, Crocker and other administration officials.

"Americans deserve an even-handed assessment of conditions in Iraq. Sadly, we will only receive a snapshot from the same people who told us the mission was accomplished and the insurgency was in its last throes," warned House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.).

"That's all the more reason why they would need to testify," a senior Foreign Relations Committee aide said of Petraeus and Crocker. "We would want them to say whether they stand by all the information in the report." He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not cleared to speak to reporters.

The legislation says that Petraeus and Crocker "will be made available to testify in open and closed sessions before the relevant committees of the Congress" before the delivery of the report. It also clearly states that the president "will prepare the report and submit the report to Congress" after consultation with the secretaries of state and defense and with the top U.S. military commander in Iraq and the U.S. ambassador.

But both the White House and Congress have widely described the assessment as coming from Petraeus. Bush has repeatedly referred to the general as the one who will be delivering the report in September and has implored the public and Republicans in Congress to withhold judgment until then. In an interim assessment last month, the White House said that significant progress has been shown in fewer than half of the 18 political and security benchmarks outlined in the legislation.

Several Republicans have hinted that their support will depend on a credible presentation by Petraeus, not only of tangible military progress but of evidence that the Iraqi government is taking real steps toward ethnic and religious reconciliation. One of them, Sen. John W. Warner (Va.), left for Iraq last night with Levin for his own assessment.

Petraeus and Crocker have said repeatedly that they plan to testify after delivering private assessments to Bush. U.S. military and diplomatic officials in Baghdad appeared puzzled yesterday when told that the White House had indicated that the two may not be appearing in public. They said they will continue to prepare for the testimony in the absence of instructions from Washington. "If anything, we just don't know the dates/times/or the committees that the assessment will be presented to," a senior military official in Baghdad said in an e-mail yesterday.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide said that, ideally, both Crocker and Petraeus would testify before that panel. The Senate committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee have also requested that Rice appear at a separate hearing but have received no response. A spokeswoman for Levin said that the senator expects at least Petraeus to testify before the Armed Services Committee but would be happy to have Crocker as well.

Although the reports from Petraeus and Crocker are the most eagerly awaited, several other assessments are also required by the May legislation. The Government Accountability Office is due to report on Iraqi political reconciliation and reconstruction by Sept. 1. An independent committee, headed by retired Marine Gen. James Jones, has been studying the training and capabilities of the Iraqi security forces and will report to Congress early next month. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, said that the chiefs are making their own assessment of the situation in Iraq and will present it to Bush in the next few weeks.

Speaking to reporters traveling with him in Iraq yesterday, Petraeus said he is preparing recommendations on troop levels while getting ready to go to Washington next month. He declined to give specifics.

"We know that the surge has to come to an end," Petraeus said, according to the Associated Press. "I think everyone understands that, by about a year or so from now, we've got to be a good bit smaller than we are right now. The question is how do you do that . . . so that you can retain the gains we have fought so hard to achieve and so you can keep going."

Staff writer Josh White contributed to this report.

Will Detroit Save Its Kids or Bureaucracy?
By Newt Gingrich
Posted: Tuesday, August 14, 2007

ARTICLES
Detroit News
Publication Date: August 8, 2007


Senior Fellow
Newt Gingrich

Recently, on "Fox News Sunday," as an example of why entrenched bureaucratic systems don't work, I pointed to the Detroit Public Schools as the worst big city school system in the country. The result was uproar--a response indicating that the bureaucracies were preparing to dig deeper trenches.

Yet, I was not giving my personal opinion. I was reporting the results of an independent study funded by the Gates Foundation. It asserted the Detroit school system graduates only one-fourth of its entering freshmen on time, placing Detroit dead last on its list.

No matter how you measure it, the Detroit Public Schools continues to fail the children it is supposed to be serving. This denies students the opportunity to participate in the information age and hurts Detroit's ability to attract world-class jobs.

I've even suggested rewarding students in the poorest neighborhoods by paying them if they get a "B" or better in math and science.

"An American Failure"

But this failure is not just Detroit's failure. It is an American failure. When American children are being cheated out of the education needed to succeed and an American city is allowed to decline while its leaders refuse to confront the failure, it should concern every American.

This human tragedy extends well beyond the schools. The New York Times reported that an African-American male who drops out of high school faces a 72 percent unemployment rate in his 20s and a 60 percent possibility of going to jail by his mid-30s. The Detroit bureaucracy now presides over a school system whose black male students are more likely to go to jail than go to college.

While city officials have been pointing to a renaissance since 1977, the record has shown fleeing populations, rising unemployment, declining wages and worsening schools. In 1950, Detroit had a population of 1.8 million people. Today, it has been more than cut in half, estimated at less than 900,000. In 1950, Detroit had the highest median income of any major city in the country. Today, it has plummeted to 66th out of 68 on this list.

This bureaucracy is so focused on protecting its monopoly, it turned down a $200 million offer from a Metro Detroit philanthropist to help high school students learn.

Faced with such appalling failure, why would the Detroit bureaucracy be so aggressive in defending itself? And why would it be so unwilling to adopt bold changes to improve its performance?

It could be that the Detroit school system is the single largest employer in the city, followed by the city government. Of Detroit's 25 largest employers, state, county and city governments provide 40 percent of the jobs.

What's Bureaucracy's Goal?

These numbers raise a critical question: What is the purpose of our government bureaucracies? Clearly, we have a fundamental disagreement about how to measure success, and it goes right to the heart of the issue.

If the purpose of the Detroit school system is to provide jobs for members of a unionized bureaucracy, pay them well and pay them on time, then Detroit's school system is a stunning success. If this is the primary purpose of the bureaucracy, Detroit may very well be the most successful school district in the nation.

If, however, the purpose of the school system is to provide Detroit's children with an education, the knowledge, the tools and the motivation to succeed in the real world, a prerequisite to prosperous, productive communities, then Detroit's bureaucratic schools are an abysmal failure.

There is ample evidence of what works in education, but the bureaucracy has systematically ignored all of it. The innovations include merit-based pay; increasing teacher-to-student ratios; revamping union rules to reward the best teachers; bonuses and incentives for new teachers; charter schools; and offering parents a coupon that allows them to send their children to the school that works best for their children and not the bureaucracies.

I've even suggested rewarding students in the poorest neighborhoods by paying them if they get a "B" or better in math and science.

Ultimately, Detroiters must decide what is in the best interests of their children and the future of their city. They can decide to accept business as usual, or they can demand real change.

But real change requires real change, not new rhetoric while doing more of the same old thing. Propping up the failed past at the expense of future generations leads to prison and poverty vouchers for too many of our children.

The time for excuses is over. The crisis is not about money. The crisis is a failure of responsibility, accountability, honesty, transparency and determination to protect the children from the bureaucracies that are crippling their lives. Who will the people of Detroit save--their failing bureaucracies or our American children?

Newt Gingrich is a senior fellow at AEI.

August 14, 2007
The General
For Top General in Iraq, Role Is a Mixed Blessing

By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD — Gen. David H. Petraeus looked out from a Black Hawk helicopter at the vistas of Baghdad rushing by 150 feet below on a recent summer evening, pointing at bustling markets, amusement parks and soccer fields scattered through neighborhoods where miles of concrete barriers stood like sentinels against the threat of suicide bombers.

Pressing the talk button on his headset, the slightly built, 54-year-old general, the top American commander in Iraq, said glimpses of the normal life that have survived the war’s horrors have helped to boost his own flagging spirits, especially on days when signs of battlefront progress are offset by new bombings with mass casualties, the starkest measure of continuing insurgent power across Iraq.

Then, he said ruefully, he wondered whether he “should have taken that civilian job” before accepting what many see as the most unpromising command since that of Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr. in Vietnam — who took charge, in 1968, when that war was going badly and American opinion was running strongly in favor of a pullout.

General Petraeus’s task may be tougher still. When he was appointed six months ago and promoted to full general, President Bush cast him as a man known for aggressive, innovative thinking on counterinsurgency warfare who could take the nearly 30,000 extra troops deployed to Iraq in January and turn the war’s tide with a “surge” aimed at securing Baghdad and its surrounding “belts.”

At the time, Mr. Bush compared General Petraeus to an audacious, offense-minded football coach with a record of turning around losing games.

The general echoed that mood. “Hard is not hopeless,” he said in a message to American troops on his arrival in Baghdad.

Since then, Mr. Bush has often sounded as though his Iraq commander offers a fount of credibility on the war that can compensate for the president’s poor poll ratings. In war speeches, he cites General Petraeus like a talisman. At a news conference at Camp David this month, he used the general’s first name three times. “I look forward to what David’s going to say,” he said, referring to the Sept. 15 deadline for General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador in Iraq, to give a comprehensive status report to the White House and Congress.

The date, for Mr. Bush, has become a kind of firebreak — the right moment, he says, for lawmakers locked in a showdown over the war to decide whether to support a continuation of the American military effort here.

But for General Petraeus, being cast as the president’s white knight has been a mixed blessing. While he talks with Mr. Bush once or twice a week, in interviews he depicts himself as owing loyalty as much to Congress as the White House and stresses the downside, as well as the upside, of the military effort here.

His view, he says, is that he is “on a very important mission that derives from a policy made by folks at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the advice and consent and resources provided by folks at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. And in September, that’s how I’m going to approach it.” Whether to fight on here, he says, is a “big, big decision, a national decision,” one that belongs to elected officials, not a field general.

The importance of sober assessments — and, by implication, of shedding the rose-tinted view of the war that has strained Congress’s patience with Iraq commanders in the past — has been one of his themes. Talking to American officers this summer during a counterinsurgency course at Taji, 15 miles north of Baghdad, he put it squarely. “We need forthright reports. We’re not trying to sugarcoat things, or put lipstick on a pig, or anything like that.”

American officials say he has carried this unvarnished approach into his dealings with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The men have differed over a range of issues, particularly the American command’s push to recruit former Sunni insurgents into the Iraqi security forces or tribal auxiliaries. It is a move General Petraeus sees as having the potential for dealing a decisive blow to Islamic militant groups linked to Al Qaeda, but which Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, fears will empower Sunnis for an eventual civil war with the ruling Shiite majority.

General Petraeus, in an e-mail message, played down reports that the relationship had been stormy, with Mr. Maliki threatening on one occasion to ask Mr. Bush to appoint a new American commander. “Actually, I have a very good relationship with the p.m., and I think he’d echo that assessment,” he said. “In fact, only on one occasion, several months back, have I ever been anything other than my normal easygoing self with the p.m. And that was while both of us were seated.”

More than 30 years ago at West Point, where he married the former Holly Knowlton, daughter of the academy’s superintendent, General Petraeus was cited in his class yearbook as “always going for it in sports, academics, leadership and even his social life.” Since then, he has won a broad Army following that helped him assemble a star cast of officers who accompanied him to Baghdad, including one, Col. H. R. McMaster, who wrote a widely acclaimed book about the failures of the Army’s highest-ranking officers to give an honest accounting of the state of the war in Vietnam.

But General Petraeus has been dogged, too, by detractors within the Army who say he is prone to overstate his accomplishments. His two previous Iraq tours, one as a two-star general commanding the 101st Airborne Division in the northern city of Mosul, another as a three-star general in Baghdad leading the effort to rebuild Iraq’s security forces, drew praise at the time.

His pacification of Mosul proved short-lived. The rapid, $19-billion Iraqi force buildup produced, on his watch, battalions impressive for the numbers trained and the huge arsenal of weapons handed over by the Americans, but the Iraqi soldiers were often unreliable, and their units prone to infiltration by militias when deployed.

Now, in the face of a stubbornly brutal conflict and declining war support at home, General Petraeus has pulled back from the pulsating sense of self-confidence that fellow officers say has been his hallmark — that he can prevail against any odds.

He has become strikingly cautious, avoiding on-the-record comments on many politically contentious issues. Shunning generalizations on the war in interviews, he lays out colored charts and graphs that show falling numbers of suicide attacks, other bombings and civilian casualties, when comparing January’s figures with those in June and July. But he eludes anything that might signal what broader conclusions he will be carrying to Washington in September.

His caution extends to the most fundamental question: whether the war can still be won. “Obviously, what we’re going to try and do is win it,” he says. “What we’re trying to do right now is generate enough hope to give it a chance. But the problem is, it’s likely to muddle along for quite a long time.” A campaign plan the general and Ambassador Crocker recently sent to Washington envisages an American troop presence of some size here at least through 2009.

Despite the challenges, some of the old bullishness has survived. When asked which American generals he most admires, General Petraeus names two remembered for turning around wars that were going badly: Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, hero of the Civil War; and another Army legend whose biography the general read on a recent 14-hour flight from Washington to Baghdad: Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, who reversed Chinese advances in Korea in 1951.

In Baghdad, he goes for regular five-mile runs in the 120-degree heat, and thrives on outpacing younger officers. His do-or-die competitiveness is legend in the Army. Fifteen years ago, he carried on during maneuvers at Fort Campbell, Ky., after being struck by a rifle bullet in the chest, until a commander ordered him taken away on a stretcher. Laughing about it now, he says he would have died if the bullet had hit the ‘A’ in Army, over his heart, instead of the ‘a’ in Petraeus on his nametag.

One issue on which the general, like Mr. Crocker, is likely to part with proponents of an early American withdrawal is on the risk of much higher levels of violence if the troops leave quickly. In an interview last month, Mr. Crocker compared the killing to a five-reel movie, saying that “as ugly as the first reel has been the other four-and-a-half are going to be way, way worse.”

Speaking to the officers at Taji, General Petraeus put the matter just as bluntly. “If you didn’t like Darfur, you’re going to hate Baghdad,” he said.