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BUT A MAN. This is an important point by Matt:
[Zalmay] Khalilzad, it's worth saying, was the General Petraeus of his time -- the lone high-ranking administration official who actually had a good reputation and seemed as best I could tell to more-or-less deserve it. He couldn't, however, deliver the goods. Not through any particular fault of his own except that he was a diplomat rather than a magician. Just as Petraeus is only a general, only a man, only an American, not someone capable of conjuring the social bases of a liberal pluralistic Iraq out of the ether.Gen. Petraeus commands an astonishing level of respect in this town. He's clearly a remarkable individual. But Iraq's problems are structural, societal, and tribal in nature. The country is not falling apart because it lacks for extraordinary, brave, and wise inhabitants. It's a tic of the media in particular and humans more generally to personify large conflicts, to ground global narratives in the successes, failures, traits and triumphs of singular people just like us. That's how we prefer to understand the world, through a person with a name and a face and a history. It makes events easier to apprehend. But it can be misleading, as you see here, when many in the media seem to be straining to change the narrative on Iraq because the individual they now associate with the surge is a remarkable one, even as the country and conflict exhibit no structural changes that make success more likely. It's important to remember that even success by Petraeus would be failure, as his success would mean huge numbers of American troops hammerlock the country into something approaching calm. Without a political and civil solution, however, that's nothing but a recipe for unending, unrelenting, occupation. And nobody, not Petraeus nor any other Great Man of History, has offered even the glimmers of such a resolution.
--Ezra Klein
