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By Root 465 0

never did find the weapons of mass destruction that had imbued the invasion with such purported urgency. The promised documentation linking Saddam Hussein to the jihadists who had plotted the 9/11 attacks never materialized. Expectations that the liberation of Iraq would trigger a wave of democratic change across the Islamic world remained a pipe dream. No road to peace in Jerusalem was ever discovered in downtown Baghdad. The presence of U.S. forces in Iraq failed to cow the mullahs ruling neighboring Iran. If anything, Operation Iraqi Freedom boosted Iranian influence. Members of the Shiite-dominated government installed in Baghdad, some of whom had fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to find sanctuary in Iran, proved remarkably sympathetic to the Islamic government in Tehran.

Based on the justifications advanced for the war by its architects and supporters, in other words, Operation Iraqi Freedom remained as unsuccessful (not to mention unnecessary) after Petraeus’s tenure in command as it had been before he arrived.

These were facts, stubborn and incontrovertible. Yet in a dazzling demonstration of how perceptions skillfully manipulated can trump reality, an audaciously revised Iraq story line rendered facts irrelevant.

FM 3-24 contains this nugget, almost a parody of postmodernism:

The central mechanism through which [insurgent] ideologies are expressed and absorbed is the narrative. A narrative is an organizational scheme expressed in story form. . . . Stories are often the basis for strategies and actions, as well as for interpreting others’ intentions.23

In the wake of the surge, insurgents in Washington intent on installing counterinsurgency as the new new American way of war wasted no time in constructing their own narrative. Lionizing “King David,” as they had lionized Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf in 1991 and Tommy Franks in 2003, a claque of semiwarriors replotted the entire Iraq War. They enshrined the surge as the war’s defining moment, with full credit assigned to Petraeus himself.

To celebrate his genius was to bask in his reflected glory. Military analysts Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan could scarcely contain themselves. “Great commanders often come in pairs,” they announced: “Eisenhower and Patton, Grant and Sherman, Napoleon and Davout, Marlborough and Eugene, Caesar and Labienus. Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno can now be added to the list.”24 Or as another member of the Petraeus fan club put it: “God has apparently seen fit to give the U.S. Army a great general in this time of need.”25

This was myth making of a high order. Just as Americans had once pointed to Andrew Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans as proof that the United States had defeated Great Britain in the (already concluded) War of 1812, so now many came to see the surge as proof that U.S. forces, led by the redoubtable Petraeus with his gift for counterinsurgency, had emerged victorious in Iraq.

Myth making in relation to war is never innocent. Those keen to install Petraeus in the pantheon of great captains alongside Ulysses S. Grant and Napoleon Bonaparte did so to advance a specific agenda. For both military practice and basic national security policy, the implications of proclaiming the surge a historic victory on a par with, say, Gettysburg or Stalingrad loomed large indeed. Energetically hawked by various national security analysts, retired generals, and jingoistic pundits, the legacy of the revised Iraq narrative consisted of four elements.

First, with Petraeus lionized for all but single-handedly redeeming a lost cause, the surge tilted the balance of civil-military authority back in favor of the top brass. Listening to General Petraeus and giving him a free hand had, so the story went, enabled George W. Bush to bring the Iraq War to a successful conclusion. With the professional malpractice perpetrated by the several commanders who had preceded Petraeus in Baghdad erased from memory, the reputation of American generalship rebounded.

Yet not all senior officers accrued additional clout. The institutional