Telegraph's
Person of the Year
General Petraeus: man with a message of hope
The critics said it couldn't be done,
but the vision and determination of General David
Petraeus have brought greater security and cause
for optimism to the people of Iraq. He is The Sunday
Telegraph's Person of the Year
For a man whose critics say he is far too fond of
the television cameras, General David Petraeus,
commander of US forces in Iraq, has been rather
out of the limelight this Christmas.
The sprightly, media-friendly 55-year-old is not
perturbed, however, that his face is no longer number
one item on the US networks. As he said last week,
where Iraq is concerned, "No news is good news."
Today, we put him in the spotlight again by naming
Gen Petraeus as The Sunday Telegraph's Person of
the Year, a new annual accolade to recognise outstanding
individual achievement.
He has been the man behind the US troop surge over
the past 10 months, the last-ditch effort to end
Iraq's escalating civil war by putting an extra
28,000 American troops on the ground.
So far, it has achieved what many feared was impossible.
Sectarian killings are down. Al-Qaeda is on the
run. And the two million Iraqis who fled the country
are slowly returning. Progress in Iraq is relative
- 538 civilians died last month. But compared with
the 3,000 peak of December last year, it offers
at least a glimmer of hope.
Nonetheless, why should we choose to nominate Petraeus
There has, after all, been no shortage of other
candidates this year. President Nicolas Sarkozy
has impressed many with his determination to reform
France, while George Osborne reinvigorated politics
in this country by daring to put tax cuts back on
the agenda - though both men still have much to
prove.
There are plenty of brave figures thrust into the
limelight who handled themselves with dignity, such
as Gillian Gibbons, the teacher jailed in Sudan;
the Glasgow airport luggage-handler John Smeaton;
and Kate and Gerry McCann. Sporting stars such as
Paula Radcliffe and Lewis Hamilton have inspired
millions of fans.
There has also been great British military leadership
and bravery on display this year, not least in Helmand,
where British troops are now fighting a Taliban
foe as fierce as anything their American counterparts
encountered in Baghdad or Fallujah.
But the reason for picking Petraeus is simple. Iraq,
whatever the current crises in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
remains the West's biggest foreign policy challenge
of this decade, and if he can halt its slide into
all-out anarchy, Gen Petraeus may save more than
Iraqi lives.
A failed Iraq would not just be a second Vietnam,
nor would it just be America's problem.
It would be a symbolic victory for al-Qaeda, a safe
haven for jihadists to plot future September 11s
and July 7s, and a battleground for a Shia-Sunni
struggle that could draw in the entire Middle East.
Our future peace and prosperity depend, in part,
on fixing this mess. And, a year ago, few had much
hope.
To appreciate the scale of the task Gen Petraeus
took on, it is necessary to go back to February
22, 2006. Or, as Iraqis now refer to it, their own
September 11. That was when Sunni-led terrorists
from al-Qaeda blew up the Shia shrine in the city
of Samarra, an act of provocation that finally achieved
their goal of igniting sectarian civil war.
A year on, an estimated 34,000 people had been killed
on either side - some of them members of the warring
Sunni and Shia militias, but most innocents tortured
and killed at random. US casualties continued to
rise, too, but increasingly American troops became
the bystanders in a religious conflict that many
believed they could no longer tame.
Except, that is, for Gen Petraeus. Despite his well-documented
obsession with fitness - he starts his 18-hour days
with a five-mile run - he is the opposite of the
brawn-over-brain image that has dogged the US military
mission in Iraq.
Top of the class of 1974 at West Point Military
Academy and the holder of a PhD in international
relations, he is the co author of the US military's
manual on counter-insurgency, a "warrior monk"
for whom the messy intrigues of asymmetric warfare
hold more interest than the straightforward challenges
of 2003's invasion.
Simply being the best and brightest soldier of his
generation, however, would not be enough for Iraq
in 2007, where a major part of the "surge"
involves reconciling Iraq's warring political tribes.
When the White House called, confirming him for
the job, President Bush was looking not just for
an outstanding leader but also a diplomat, a politician
and a negotiator. It seems he got them all.
"Petraeus has a rare combination of great geopolitical
skills as well as tactical and military ones,"
says retired General Jack Keane, a fellow architect
of the surge strategy. "He is good at working
with ambassadors, with the Iraqi government, and
he also knows how to cope with uncertainty and failure,
which is what you get in an environment like Iraq."
Lest Gen Keane seem a little biased, it should be
pointed out that British commanders hold Gen Petraeus
in similarly high regard.
Several Northern Ireland veterans who worked with
him in Baghdad this year came away with the opinion
that it is now America, not Britain, that is the
world leader in counter-insurgency.
As Petraeus toured some of Baghdad's abandoned,
bullet-scarred Sunni neighbourhoods last February,
his own comrades were not the only ones predicting
he might fail spectacularly.
Among the US public, the clamour grew for the troops
to be brought home altogether, and Iraq to be declared
a lost cause unworthy of further American sacrifice.
The surge's "boots on the ground" strategy
would simply force the militias into temporary hiding,
critics said, wasting thousands more Americans lives
in the process.
The strategy's chances of success were commonly
put at only one in three - and those were the odds
quoted by its supporters. Indeed, when The Sunday
Telegraph visited Baghdad in the spring, US troops
were candid about their expectations.
"Sure, the bad guys will go into hiding,"
said one commander in Jamia, an al-Qaeda-infested
neighbourhood with 30 murders a month. "All
we can hope is that things will have improved by
the time they come back, so they're no longer welcome."
Nine months on, things do seem to have improved,
thanks largely to Petraeus's extraordinary coup
of turning Sunni insurgents against their extremist
allies in al-Qaeda.
With the chief accelerant in the civil war gone,
Shia militias such as the Mehdi Army have also been
deprived of their main raison d'être, and
with extra US troops on the streets, Iraqis who
had previously felt vulnerable to the gunmen now
feel safe enough to return home.
Things are far from perfect but, after four years
in which events did nothing but get worse, the sight
of a souk re-opening, or a Shia family being welcomed
back home by their Sunni neighbours, has remarkable
morale-boosting power.
Where once Iraqis saw the glass as virtually empty,
now they can see a day when it might at least be
half full.
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