The Iraq Report's Other Voice

Most of Crocker's time is spent in the controlled chaos of meetings with Iraqi officials -- cajoling, commiserating and pressuring -- or hearing from and issuing instructions to a massive embassy staff of more than 600. He has hosted a flood of congressional and other high-level delegations that have swept through Baghdad.

His preferred method of information-gathering, however, is to be out and about among Iraqis. His fluent Arabic allows him to question shopkeepers and passers-by, while aides frantically ask embassy interpreters what he is talking about. Crocker's walkabouts attract hordes of Iraqis with everyday complaints about security threats, electricity shortages and missing paychecks. Although his excursions are choreographed with security teams and hangers-on, Crocker's entourage pales beside that of Petraeus in similar outings.

The near-simultaneous appointment of new U.S. diplomatic and military leadership in Iraq last winter was widely read as a signal that, despite the optimism with which Bush announced his new strategy, Washington finally recognized the perilous state of its Iraq venture and was prepared to step back from micromanagement and blue-sky assessments. Crocker's instructions, the official familiar with his thinking said, were, "It's going to be hard. . . . Get in there and make things happen."

He found Baghdad vastly changed -- and not for the better -- from his last posting there, in the summer of 2003, when he briefly served as political adviser to occupation czar L. Paul Bremer. Entire neighborhoods Crocker knew intimately from then -- and from his first Baghdad tour as a junior diplomat in the late 1970s -- had been destroyed by terrorist attacks and an escalating sectarian war. The U.S. military presence had become overwhelming, and the embassy that opened with Bremer's departure in 2004 was bloated and in disarray, with too many of the wrong people and not enough of the right ones.

Crocker demanded and received a high-level State Department review of staffing and brought in several of his own choices -- some of whom had to be persuaded to leave senior posts elsewhere -- for top positions in the Iraqi capital. "Originally, many of the people assigned to Baghdad had never been overseas before," said a U.S. official who recently returned from Iraq. "This trip was the first time I've had confidence in the people running the show. . . . We've finally replaced noble-minded, idealistic political appointees with people who can really make long-term plans."

Except for wry outbursts intended as humor, aides said, Crocker keeps his frustrations and irritations to himself, working them off in marathon jogs around the Green Zone, sometimes with Petraeus. The two men appear similar on the surface -- intense, high-achieving fitness enthusiasts -- and both have told intimates that their overall goal in today's congressional testimony is to maintain their integrity and that of their institutions.

But they also represent two vastly different diplomatic and military cultures, bringing different experiences and frames of historical reference to their jobs. Vietnam -- the defining event for a U.S. military generation -- was the subject of Petraeus's 1987 doctoral dissertation, though he did not serve there. While cautioning that historical analogies are always imprecise, Petraeus wrote that "there is no desire" within the military "to repeat the experience that provided the material for such descriptively titled books as 'Defeated: Inside America's Military Machine.' "

Beirut was Crocker's Vietnam. A brief U.S. intervention in its civil war ended when a terrorist truck bomb killed 241 Marines in 1983. For many in the Bush administration who frequently refer to the attack, the lesson was that the U.S. withdrawal represented a capitulation to terrorism. For Crocker, what stuck was the unpredictable consequences of American involvement in an internal conflict it does not understand.

Staff writers Thomas E. Ricks, Ann Scott Tyson and Robin Wright contributed to this report.