Decked out in dress greens, his uniform so laden with insignia, badges, patches, ribbons, and medals that it seemed to pull him into a slight stoop, the Most Important General in America, David Howell Petraeus, arrived on Capitol Hill in September of 2007 bearing remarkable news.

Just back from Baghdad, the hot center of a four-year-long war that had come to be seen as a fiasco, Petraeus would testify that things had begun to improve—that the counter-insurgency strategy he had initiated eight months before was working, against all odds and expectations. Violent incidents had fallen off dramatically. Former Sunni insurgents had come around and begun to oppose al-Qaeda. Dangerous Shiite militias were putting down their arms. Instead of conceding futility and abandoning Iraq to chaos and civil war, there was a good chance the United States could stabilize the country enough to begin a relatively bloodless and honorable phased withdrawal.

The general brought, in short, unwelcome news, at least to many Democratic lawmakers.

When he arrived in the crowded hearing room, on the morning of September 10, only his immediate staff had read his planned testimony. With members of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees staring down at him from a two-tiered dais, the general emphasized that simple fact: “I wrote this testimony myself,” he said. “It has not been cleared by, nor shared with, anyone in the Pentagon, the White House, or the Congress.”

Shutters clicked and cameras flashed. The general seemed perfectly calm but was, in fact, uncomfortable. The stakes were enormous, the emotion was palpable, the scrutiny was intense. The sheer length of the hearings would be physically painful. Fortified with Motrin, Petraeus sat erect at the edge of a hard chair that afforded no cushion for his pelvis, which he had broken seven years earlier in a parachute jump. He is a slight man, still boyish in his mid-50s, with blue eyes, limp brown hair combed flat to the right, and a concave face whose features slope away from a prominent nose. He looks more like a bookworm than a warrior. Cheerful by nature, he is eager to please and eager to explain. Petraeus is a world-class explainer. There is scarcely a soldier who has served with him who has not, in the general’s own words, “been PowerPointed to within an inch of his life.” His presentations are masterworks of explication that aspire to the level of art. They reflect his deep understanding of—indeed, his love for—the byzantine machinery of America’s military-industrial complex.

But no matter how well prepared he might be, there was little chance of dazzling this crowd. Before he had even opened his mouth he was under attack. Democrats had won a majority in Congress and were gearing up to ride anger and frustration over the Iraq war to the White House. The last thing they wanted to hear was that things were looking up—that President George W. Bush’s so-called surge was working. The advocacy group MoveOn.org, anticipating that Petraeus would fail to signal retreat, had attacked him with a full-page ad in that day’s New York Times, labeling him “General Betray Us.” Before the first word of his presentation, Armed Services chairman Ike Skelton described the general’s efforts in Iraq as a failure. Foreign Affairs Committee chair Tom Lantos, a pink-faced Democrat from California with a perfectly coiffed white halo, squinted down at the general—again before seeing or hearing a word from him—and pronounced, “With all due respect to you, I must say, I don’t buy it.”

That was just the start. Petraeus would sit through two long days of hearings, first in the House, and the next day before the Senate heavyweights, including three Democratic presidential hopefuls vying with one another to appear the most fervently anti-war. He had flown through eight time zones to answer questions, only to face interrogators more keen on listening to themselves. He was lectured by Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joseph Biden, who questioned the validity of the general’s figures about the sharply reduced violence. (Biden was in fact wrong.) Senator Hillary Clinton, then the front-runner, in so many words called Petraeus a liar. To be fair, she put it politely, and might even have meant it as a compliment, one professional prevaricator to another, calling his testimony an “extraordinary effort” but one that requires a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Senator Barack Obama was equally dismissive. He had staked his campaign in part on the purity of his opposition to the war. When his turn came, Obama lectured Petraeus on the futility of his mission, using up the full seven minutes allocated to him and giving the general no chance to respond. “We have now set the bar so low,” said Obama, “that modest improvement in what was a completely chaotic situation … is considered success. And it’s not. This continues to be a disastrous foreign-policy mistake.”

Petraeus had known that his reception would be unfriendly. This was not the loyal soldier reporting back from the front to a grateful nation; this was an inquisition. Congress had commanded his presence. The general had prepared for it like a defense attorney facing a hostile jury. He understood the politics in play. He also knew what was going on in Iraq far better than anyone else in the room.

It had been a dark period. His strategy for turning things around wasn’t unpopular only with Congress. Most of his own superior officers at the time—people such as General George Casey, the previous commander in Iraq and now the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, and General John Abizaid, who headed the U.S. Central Command (CentCom), the job Petraeus himself now holds—didn’t believe in it, either. A lifelong team player, Petraeus had been plucked out of the chain of command by President Bush. For the first time in his life, his immediate superiors were envious, suspicious, even actively hostile. In Iraq, American casualties had soared in the spring months, when he began implementing his new strategy, ordering soldiers out of their fortified enclaves and armored Humvees and into forward bases where they patrolled the dangerous streets on foot. The carnage was considerable, and took its toll. Petraeus made a point of visiting the wounded and attending the memorial services for as many of those killed as he could, placing his commander’s coin before each ceremonial display of boots, rifle, and helmet, and writing a letter to each fallen soldier’s next of kin. Two days before the hearings began, the general and his wife, Holly, had pinned her father’s jump wings on the uniform of their only son, an R.O.T.C. cadet, during a graduation ceremony at Fort Benning, Georgia. Petraeus had an understanding of the risks and costs that was personal and profound.

Facing Congress, he didn’t waver. It was the same now as on the day Bush had met with him privately in the Oval Office after the Senate confirmed his selection for what most felt was an impossible mission. The general had said, “Mr. President, this isn’t double-down.… This is all-in.” It was an expression that would be repeated often within his inner circle. They were staking everything on the outcome. There could be no second thoughts, no looking back.

The legislators who peered down skeptically at this unimposing officer in his resplendent uniform did not know their man. Here was someone who had forged an unparalleled record of success in perhaps the most competitive institution in America. In the words of one former aide, “Petraeus is the most competitive man on the planet.”

Biden pressed him hard, seeking to dismiss the general’s numbers and to wrest an admission that Iraq’s violence was beyond control. The senator had made frequent trips to the war zone. He saw himself not just as a critic but as a particularly well-informed and wily critic. He cast doubt on the general’s data, which showed a steep decline in violent incidents beginning in midsummer. The chairman contrasted that trend with contradictory findings in a recent Government Accountability Office report, which he referred to as “an independent study,” suggesting that it was more credible. He let the damning implication hang there for a moment, and then magnanimously waved it aside, saying, “But let me not get into that debate.” Generous Joe had decided not to embarrass the witness further.

But he did want one little thing. He wanted Petraeus to concede—two sensible men looking each other in the eye—that however you crunched the numbers Baghdad was bad news. “Let me ask you a question,” said the chairman, like a cat probing a mousehole with its paw. “Can a Sunni Arab travel safely to a Shia neighborhood in Baghdad today without fear of being kidnapped or killed?”

Petraeus would respond, but he wasn’t going to let the slap at his statistics go unanswered. “First of all, Mr. Chairman, if I could make just one comment about the G.A.O. report … ” He explained that, far from being “independent,” it had used exactly the same data he had, except that its numbers were out of date—they ended “at least five weeks prior to our cutoff date, which ran until this past Friday.” Petraeus added, “The final five weeks have been pretty important.”

“Again, I don’t want to get into an argument about that,” said Biden. It was increasingly evident why not. “Let me get directly to my question”—and he asked again, extending that paw deeper into the hole, if there was any part of Baghdad where a Sunni could travel safely into a Shia area.

Leaning forward in his chair, Petraeus said, “It depends on the neighborhood, frankly, sir.” He conceded that the city was still dangerous, but insisted that, yes, there were now areas safe enough for Sunnis and Shiites to travel.

Biden wouldn’t let go. He tried a different approach, one that showcased his boots-on-the-ground expertise. He recounted how, on a recent visit to Iraq, his helicopter had been grounded by a sandstorm outside Baghdad. He and the other dignitaries had waited three hours for the storm to subside. Biden asked, “If that sandstorm had kept up, would any of those guys have gotten in a vehicle and traveled back to Baghdad?” He smiled broadly for the cameras with a great show of sparkling white teeth. “Maybe I’m mistaken. Was there any possibility of that likely to happen?”

He was answered by Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who had been working closely with Petraeus and was seated next to him at the witness table.

“Yes, sir,” said Crocker. “We tried to keep some of the commotion behind the scenes out of your view, but one of the alternatives we were actively working on was a road movement all the way back to Baghdad if we couldn’t get your helicopter out.”

“And that road movement would have been highly secured, would it not?” asked Biden.

“Well, for the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, yes, sir.”

You could almost hear the trap snap shut. Then came the laughter, which brought another smile to Biden’s face, this one sheepish. “Oh, I love you,” Biden said. “I love you.” Biden had drawn a different picture than he intended: the Washington Pooh-Bah visiting the combat zone for a photo op, no doubt creating a nuisance for the men working to secure his safety, impatiently waiting out a sandstorm, and now questioning the judgment of the general charged with protecting him. Who knew the situation better—the visiting pol or the general? And Petraeus hadn’t even spoken in his own defense.

Congress underestimated David Petraeus. He is a man of such distinction that in the army legends have formed about his rise. Beyond his four-star rank, he possesses a stature so matchless it deserves its own adjective—call it “Petraean,” perhaps. It is an adjective that would be mostly complimentary, but not entirely so—there can be a hard edge to the man, a certain lack of empathy, and there is something vaguely unseemly in his obvious ambition. But when Petraeus tests himself, he usually wins. When he assumed command in Iraq, he had accepted a challenge few thought even he could meet, turning around the longest and most mismanaged war in American history. But Iraq is only part of the story. Through his writing and teaching, Petraeus was at the same time redefining how the nation will fight in the 21st century. And he was doing something more difficult still: leading a cultural and doctrinal revolution inside one of the most hidebound institutions in the world, the United States Army. Whatever the fate of Iraq and Afghanistan, this transformation is a Petraean legacy that will be felt for years to come.

Obama, Biden, and Clinton are now even more directly Petraeus’s bosses than they were on that day in September 2007. As they proceed to escalate the war in Afghanistan and dial down the operation in Iraq—and as they confront new dangers in Pakistan and Iran—they are now on the same team with the general, no matter how far apart they were back then. For them, and particularly for President Obama, the responsibility and consequences of wielding American power have become very real—as they long have been for the general. On the hard questions of war, the Obama White House is not just listening to Petraeus but heeding his advice.

I met David Petraeus for the first time at his spacious office at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, Florida. He was dressed in black stretch running pants and a gray nylon Windbreaker. His office is on an upper floor of a nondescript concrete building that looks as if it was built to withstand a nuclear blast, and probably was. Palm fronds waved outside the window. It was a weekend afternoon, so the colonels toiling away feverishly before computer monitors in a row just outside his door were dressed in casual civilian clothes. The general, I was informed, had postponed his run to talk to me. He had been reluctant to cooperate. Petraeus has kept a low profile since taking over at CentCom, one of the U.S. military’s six combatant regional commands, and by far the most active of them. Its responsibilities include Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, and its domain stretches from Sudan east to Pakistan, and from Kazakhstan south to Kenya. Petraeus is fighting two wars and has some 230,000 military personnel under his command. An army officer can aspire to only two higher posts: the army chief of staff and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

He is all gristle and bone. You sense that, if he ever were to overindulge, the fat cells would not know where to check in. He is 57, but his brown hair has not noticeably grayed or thinned. He is cheerful, charming, and talkative. You can understand how his boyhood nickname came to be “Peaches.” Having decided to speak to me, he is an open book, except for a few subject areas that are off limits (his family and the details of ongoing military operations). From the computer screens in his building Petraeus can call up real-time images from drone aircraft throughout his command; the screens in his office were blacked out for my visit.

I asked if he has yet made any concessions to age.

“Well, I can’t run as fast as I used to,” he says.

“You’ve accepted this about yourself?”

“No, of course not, but I have accommodated it. I mean, I have come to terms with the fact. I’ve also banged myself up a couple different times, so that there is some damage, although I’m really very, very lucky, especially given all the years of doing parachuting and other vigorous stuff.” I ask him if he has started to think about a life after his military career—he can climb only so much higher. He says, No, and seems startled by the question—“I mean, I’m never going to take up fishing or golf.” Is he going to take up the presidency? There are those who would like him to, and they have launched a “Petraeus 2012” Web site. He dismisses that prospect completely and convincingly. He is steadfastly apolitical, on principle, and even stopped voting after his promotion to major general. (Later, he will say to a Vanity Fair photographer, out of the blue, “By the way, I’m not running for president.”)

When I mention the fishing-or-golf comment to a friend of his, the man laughs and says, “I’ll bet there are a lot of people on his staff who wish he would decide to spend an afternoon now and then on the golf course.” The general’s unrelenting nature is not always an easy thing to live with. He has accumulated a large and deeply devoted following but has rarely been the most popular officer on base. At West Point he was known as a “striver,” a term that cadets employ with equal parts envy and scorn. His determination carried over to the units under his command, which did not always share their young commander’s zeal. In their book, The Fourth Star, which profiles four post-Vietnam American generals, David Cloud and Greg Jaffe describe Captain Petraeus’s method for improving the efficiency of vehicle repair with the 24th Infantry Division: “He donned a pair of pressed coveralls and sat with a megaphone and a maintenance manual open in front of him, reciting step-by-step instructions for greasing an axle or changing an oil filter.” This sort of approach earned Petraeus the unflattering nickname Squad Leader Six, meaning he was a micro-manager—a commander (a “six” in radio code) who insisted on running his entire company like a staff sergeant (a “squad leader”). Petraeus can be brusque. He can be quick to dismiss those who falter as incompetent or lacking in motivation. The sheer velocity of his career has created aftershocks, and those who stood too close have sometimes been bruised. Noncoms with ambitious officers often worry they will be worked to death (in combat, perhaps literally) to further their commander’s lust for glory. Petraeus appears to have mostly overcome this kind of grumbling, and that sort of reputation, by leading from the front—by mastering himself whatever tasks he sets for others. And those who earn his respect are given extraordinary latitude.

There may be generals who are disinclined to wear every scrap of résumé on their uniforms. Petraeus is not one of them. Just looking at him, you can trace the precise path of his 36-year-long upward march through the U.S. Army, from the Ranger tab on his upper left sleeve (he earned it first thing out of West Point, in 1974) to the yellow, shield-shaped patch sewn just below it (the shoulder patch of the U.S. Central Command). Forming a colorful mini-placard from clavicle to coat pocket are 10 rows of ribbons, nearly 30 ribbons in all, several of which bear oak-leaf clusters, signifying multiple awards. There are four silver stars on each shoulder, a growing length of yellow combat-service stripes on his lower right sleeve, and an assortment of other trimmings: master-parachutist badge, air-assault badge, combat-action badge, French jump wings, and, on his right shoulder, where so-called combat patches are proudly worn, the Screaming Eagle of the 101st Airborne Division, which he led into battle during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His coat is so laden with tokens of distinction that it looks as if it could stand up by itself.

No man is entirely free of vanity, but this embrace of formal display invites conjecture. To me, it prompts three notions, three speculations, about David Petraeus. I’ll mention two of them here and bring up the third later on.

The first notion it suggests is sincerity—utter, complete sincerity. Petraeus is rightly proud of his career, of his service, and of the institution of the U.S. Army. In any large organization, tolerance of the official culture falls along a broad range from outright hostility to unswerving loyalty. The scale tilts more toward indifference in the lower ranks, and even in the highest echelons, where the scale tilts the other way, it is rare to find someone whose institutional loyalty exceeds his personal ambition. As far as the army is concerned, Petraeus is not just loyal but reverent—a true believer.

The second notion suggested by the display is this: He likes to win, and more. For the most competitive man on the planet, it is not enough just to win—he also needs to be seen winning, and to have won. To succeed in plain sight often means announcing objectives in advance. “Committing to a particular goal publicly puts pressure on oneself,” Petraeus says. “It becomes an enormous action-forcing mechanism and often helps you achieve more than you might have had you kept your goals to yourself.”

For Petraeus, successfully meeting a difficult challenge can become an end in itself. At West Point, he was among a rarefied group in his 1974 class—a “Star Man” (one of the top 5 percent academically) who was also a member of the academy’s intercollegiate skiing and soccer teams, and a cadet captain. “There were very few people who were both intercollegiate athletes and Star Men,” Petraeus told me. But this wasn’t enough for Cadet Petraeus. He also sought, and won, a place in the school’s most challenging academic program, a pre-med track for which only 9 or 10 (in a class of nearly 900) would qualify. Petraeus wasn’t even much interested in medicine. “In a lot of ways, I think I climbed that particular academic mountain just because it was the toughest one to climb,” he recalls. In the end, although it was his for the taking, he never applied to medical school. It was Zen-like. The achieving was important, not the reward.

Petraeus may be the most accomplished collector of merit badges in history. One of the earliest published pictures of him shows a seven- or eight-year-old Cub Scout in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York—blond hair combed neatly in a little flip, with a shiny brass Bobcat clasp holding together the gold-and-blue neckerchief. He was exactly one rung up the organizational ladder of Scouting. The blue uniform shirt in that picture is as yet unadorned, a Sistine Chapel awaiting its Michelangelo. Petraeus has been painting a career on his uniform ever since. Many of his distinctions have come outside the military—his academic prowess, his feats as a runner, his published writing, and his role as a family man, all of which have received formal honors in one way or another. (But you can’t wear Father of the Year on a uniform.) He knows that he is driven, and openly admits that it goes back to his own father, a retired Dutch sea captain who had shepherded convoys of merchant vessels across the Atlantic in the most dangerous years of World War II: “His comment to me periodically was ‘Results, boy, results.’” Heather O’Dell, a childhood friend who knew the Petraeus family well, remembers, “There used to be something Dave took very seriously called the Whole Man Score. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but you got points for all the different things you did. It included sports, grades, extracurricular activities, Scouts, church, and there were all these physical-fitness goals attached to it. He was always concerned about having a very high Whole Man Score.”

The army is as openly and straightforwardly competitive as anything outside of organized sports. Petraeus often tells his troops, “Life is a competitive endeavor.” War is the ultimate form of competition, so the military fosters a culture of contention. Performance is calibrated, and excellence formally defined, to an extent that some might consider too narrow, too literal. But one clear advantage is that any soldier who wishes to excel knows exactly how to perform to the army’s standard. Or, in Petraeus’s case, to outperform.

The testimony of David Petraeus before Congress was televised live, and General John Galvin, a retired four-star, watched it with avid interest and occasional amusement from his home in Atlanta. He was reminded of the first time he had met Petraeus, then a 28-year-old officer who had been recommended to him by a colleague as “the best captain in the division.”

When Galvin was given command of the 24th Infantry Division, at Fort Stewart, in 1981, he loaded his belongings into a trailer at Fort Monroe, in Hampton, Virginia, hitched it to his car, and drove down to the base, outside Savannah. He was met at the gate by his new aide, a whippet-thin, apple-cheeked, fair-haired young man who looked no older than 18. Petraeus took the wheel and drove Galvin to his quarters. The new commander tried to make conversation. He mentioned a few changes that had been on his mind, things he would like to implement with the division “right away.”

Petraeus listened and then said, “Done, sir.”

Galvin assumed that the captain meant he had noted the requests and would soon take care of them. But he wasn’t sure.

“Really?” he asked.

“I took care of those things, sir.”

The general mentioned another item on his agenda.

“Done, sir,” said Petraeus.

Galvin was impressed. He would expect a captain who had commanded a company to have a good grasp of that particular duty, but Petraeus had never commanded at a higher level. How had he managed to anticipate what a new leader might want? Not just anticipate it but have the confidence to act on it without waiting for instruction? In time, the general saw in his young aide a level of competence he had never before encountered.

“And here he is now before Congress, a four-star general himself, and he’s sitting on the edge of the chair leaning slightly forward, and they talk and talk and talk, and then he says, in effect, ‘Done, sir,’” says Galvin. “See, David Petraeus listens. He listens so intently that he slowly and subtly begins to dominate the conversation, even if the other person is the one talking. Before long they realize that he is out in front of them. He finds ways of letting them know—not with impatience but with earnest efficiency. You saw him doing that with those senators. He would listen for 10 minutes and then give back a three-sentence summary of what they just said. What I kept hearing was that young captain telling me, ‘Done, sir.’”

By the time Galvin met his new aide, a legend had already begun to take hold around Petraeus. While at West Point, he had not only distinguished himself in all the usual ways—but also wooed and wed the daughter of the academy superintendent, General William Knowlton. (How’s that for improving your Whole Man Score?) Fresh out of the academy, Petraeus went to Ranger School, a grueling nine-week program designed to shape promising young infantrymen into elite soldiers. It mixes mental challenges—navigating in total darkness through remote, unfamiliar terrain—with extreme physical privation. “To an outsider it looks like just a survival course,” says Martin “Jay” Joyce, an academy classmate of Petraeus’s and his “Ranger Buddy” for nine weeks. “But the difficulties you endure are just there to provide the stress. It’s one thing to lead men. It’s another to lead men who no longer wish to be led. The course breaks you down with exhaustion and hunger and sleep deprivation, and then just keeps pushing and pushing.”

Petraeus won first place in all three categories of competition and was given the William O. Darby Award, named for the founder of the Rangers—an award which is not always given, and whose winner “must clearly demonstrate himself as being a cut above all other Rangers.” Joyce has a picture of himself and Petraeus holding a black-and-yellow flag displaying crossed rifles and the words “Ranger 1975 Honor Graduate.” Petraeus is grinning broadly and holding the flag up before the two of them. Joyce, notably, isn’t touching the flag. “It was Dave’s flag, not mine,” he says.

Throughout his career, extreme fitness has remained central to Petraeus’s method. He is determined to match his intellectual achievements with physical ones. Another legend grew out of Ranger School—you’ll find it in countless news stories—that Petraeus had lashed Joyce to himself with a rope and dragged him through the final stages of the course. That story isn’t literally true, says Joyce, but the gist of it is. “I graduated from Ranger School because of Dave Petraeus. He got me through. To this day, anyone who graduates from it has my respect. But Dave—he didn’t just graduate; he was the best.”

Galvin quickly sized up his young aide as a man who would rise rapidly. The question was not whether Petraeus would someday command the army but how he would command it. How good a general could he be? “He was getting great commands and having a terrific time jumping out of airplanes,” Galvin says. “He was already well acquainted with how to run a mechanized unit and a paratrooper unit, and I think he wanted to keep doing that. He has a strong intellect. In the military, that frequently comes up as ‘intellectual’—in other words, watch out for him, because he’s not a romp-’em, stomp-’em soldier. It is usually not an article of praise in an efficiency report. But David is also a very physical guy. What you find out about him is that he is not just one thing; he’s combinations of things. You have your cogitators and your agitators. Petraeus is both.”

Galvin pushed Petraeus to sample the atmosphere of civilian academia. With his superb credentials, Petraeus could have attended any Ivy League graduate program he wished. He chose the Woodrow Wilson School, at Princeton, where there were relatively few military students. The idea, as he saw it, and as Galvin encouraged him to see it, was to step outside his comfort zone and into a broader arena of thought and argument. “I remember, in my first week, I went to this arms-control brown-bag lunch,” Petraeus says. “I mean, I was an infantry officer. I knew nothing about arms control. But I figured, Let’s go to the arms-control lunch—it’s sort of military-sounding. And we’re sitting in there, and I’m looking around the room, and you know some of these guys—one guy is missing a sock, actually.” The man turned out to be a Nobel laureate in physics. “I’m just coming from the Command and General Staff College, where we had debates that we thought were really fierce. They were about, you know, should you have 200 MX missiles or 230? You go to Princeton and it’s: Maybe you should have no ICBMs at all!”

Petraeus had his ego bruised, an experience that he acknowledges was valuable. Some professors found his early work below average, which was a completely new experience. But he quickly found his footing. He approached his academic sojourn with military efficiency. Scrutinizing the requirements for master’s and Ph.D. degrees, he discovered that he could, by doubling and tripling up on the work, complete both in a third of the normal time. He proposed this accelerated program to school administrators and, when they objected, showed them the bylaws that permitted it.

“They really didn’t like it that much, candidly,” he says. “They would say, ‘David, why are you doing this? I mean, why don’t you just stay a little longer? Just tell the army you need another couple years.’ I said, ‘Look, I’m an infantry officer. I’m going to be away from troops. Most people have told me I’m insane to do what I’m doing because they do the math and they say you’re going to be away from troops for six years.’”

He sprinted through graduate studies at Princeton and then through two years in the prestigious social-studies department at West Point. His doctoral thesis concerned Vietnam, work that led him, along with other young military thinkers, to question the army’s conventional view of that war, which tended to place the blame for failure on civilian leaders and the press. As the critics saw it, the failure had been one mainly of strategy: the military had gone about it all wrong. What had been needed was an approach that came under the broad heading “counter-insurgency.”

It was a way of thinking that challenged not just the army’s handling of Vietnam but also its prevailing strategy and doctrines in the decades that followed. The post–Vietnam War army had labored to bury the memory of defeat. It went back to preparing for what it did best—large conventional wars, sweeping tank battles on the plains of Central Europe. This emphasis would eventually breed “the Powell Doctrine,” which counseled against any use of force that was not overwhelming and rapidly decisive—the kind of war that was fought in the desert against Saddam Hussein, in 1990–91. As the world evolved, and as the Soviet Union collapsed, the might of the U.S. military grew comparably stronger and less vulnerable to challenge—and, as a result, more resistant to change.

This was the army that had nurtured Petraeus, that would continue to educate him, and that had showered him with recognition. Inside the army he was famous by his mid-30s—the golden boy. He would become a lieutenant colonel in 1991, a full colonel four years later, and a brigadier general, or one-star, in 2000, before he was 47 years old. It would hardly be possible for anyone to have embraced the conventions and traditions of the U.S. Army with more enthusiasm and success. And yet, in the curious way these things work—perhaps in precisely the way these things should work—the system was molding David Petraeus into a rebel.

The subversion of the army by David Petraeus was well under way when retired general Jack Keane decided, in 2006, that it was time for the United States to change course in Iraq. A fellow former commander of the 101st Airborne, Keane knew Petraeus as well as anyone. He had been standing beside him during a live-fire exercise at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in 1991, when an accidental M16 discharge sent a high-velocity 5.56-mm. round through Petraeus’s chest, just above his right nipple. The round tore away a portion of his lung and blew a four-inch hole in his back on its way out. Keane flew with him in the rescue helicopter to the post hospital and on to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville. On the way, he watched the 38-year-old lieutenant colonel drift in and out of consciousness.

“Dave, I want you to stay with us,” Keane told him.

Petraeus said, “Yes, sir.”

He was back at work in record time, demonstrating to the hospital staff, just days after surgery, that he was not an ordinary patient by removing the IV tubes from his arm and dropping to the floor to do push-ups. The medical staff took note of his toughness. The insertion of a chest tube between his ribs, without anesthesia, had produced only a grunt.

Keane not only knew Petraeus personally but was also familiar with his ideas. In 2006, when Keane began rethinking the Iraq war and lobbying top defense-policy-makers, he already had Petraeus in mind to oversee what became known as the surge.

There are lessons enough in the long history of warfare to frame any predicament, and the one most policymakers seemed wedded to in 2006 was the conventional view of the Vietnam War. Here’s how the thinking went: No matter how important a conflict, public and political support for it erodes as casualties and expenses rise. In Vietnam, the U.S. government gave up on a difficult but doable military mission, sacrificing what could have been a hard-won victory to the god of public opinion.

Keane was one of the first insiders in Washington to argue that this was the wrong way to think about both Vietnam and Iraq. A retired four-star and a big, gruff, plainspoken New Yorker, he had served as a paratrooper in Vietnam and had long questioned the conventional wisdom about that conflict. As they had in Vietnam, American forces in Iraq were losing the trust and support of the people, who were suffering terrible levels of violence. Yet the generals in command persisted on their course, targeting insurgents and working to secure the safety of their own troops first.

“What worried me,” says Keane, “was that Abizaid and Casey believed their policy was working when it was obvious to the average citizen that something was wrong.”

Petraeus was well offstage as the conversations in Washington began, but at the same time he was the center of attention. In the sorry three-year saga of events in Iraq after the invasion, there had been only one unequivocal success—the 101st Airborne’s occupation of Mosul, under the command of David Petraeus. If there is one basic reason he succeeded where others had failed, it was his enthusiastic embrace of nation building, which was anathema to the Bush administration. Beginning with his doctoral thesis on Vietnam, and then during tours in Central America, Haiti, and Bosnia, Petraeus had been developing his own ideas about counter-insurgency. He was primed to put them into practice. In rebuilding Mosul, Petraeus ignored or gained exception to orders he didn’t like, avoiding perhaps the worst misstep of the Coalition Provisional Authority, in Baghdad, which had been to ban former Ba’th Party officials (who had managed Iraq for Saddam) from any role in governance. Petraeus saw the need for experienced, capable locals to help restore order. He also used the ready availability of American funds to finance critical projects. In the end he cajoled and commanded a province of two million toward a measure of normalcy unrivaled in any other part of the country. These gains would fall apart over time when Petraeus and his division were withdrawn, in 2004, and the Iraqi governor he had worked closely with was removed by L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul in Baghdad. (The replacement governor was assassinated later that year.) But for a brief period Petraeus had tasted victory, and had reveled in the nickname given him by the people of Mosul, “King David.”

Such notoriety came at a cost. Petraeus’s independence and his growing public stature threatened those in charge, particularly because his approach ran counter to their own. After a second tour—his job this time being to train an Iraqi army, which met with only limited success—Petraeus published an article in Military Review listing 14 lessons learned. Within the military, the article was enormously influential. At a time when Congress and the public were growing deeply disenchanted, he called for more of almost everything—a more aggressive counter-insurgency strategy, more reconstruction projects, more cultural sensitivity, and more partnership with the State Department and other civilian agencies. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been determined to win the war with as few troops as possible and, despite the chaos that followed Saddam’s fall, remained committed to doing more with less. Petraeus, in contrast, argued that grinding the rebels down required building civil society up. “Money is ammunition” was one of his 14 points. But before civilian projects and political improvement could happen, wholesale carnage had to stop. His approach was troop-intensive and long-term. He received the customary award for disagreeing with his bosses: exile.

Well, not exactly exile, but Kansas—Petraeus was sent to head the Combined Arms Center, at Fort Leavenworth. He left with a mandate to shake things up, and the assignment in his case was to be temporary, but it is a command that epitomizes the word “mundane.” It runs all of the army’s combat-training centers and schools, and is responsible for crafting army doctrine. It was an important job, but has often represented a career dead end. Petraeus was enough of an intellectual to know what many men of action do not: ideas precede and determine acts. If you want to change something as big as an army, how better than to change the way it thinks? In 2005, from his base in the heartland, Petraeus went to work drawing up a new set of doctrinal manuals for the modern military—he called it “Full Spectrum Operations”—which posited that all future military efforts would be some mix of offense, defense, and stability and support operations. He and the school commandants under him called for new curricula and new reading lists at army training centers, emphasizing cultural awareness, people-friendly tactics, and a broader range of tools. Petraeus believed the pre-9/11 soldier had been taught what to think. He wanted the post-9/11 soldier taught how to think.

“We started doing a lot more seminar, a lot less lecture,” he says. “We emphasized seminars. You have students who have enormous experience, you know, often much more experience than the folks who are at the lectern or leading the seminar.”

As part of an overhaul of army instructional materials, he recruited a team of unprecedented diversity to draft a new field manual on counter-insurgency, inviting not just scholars and soldier-scholars but human-rights activists, journalists, and diplomats. In addition to emphasizing population protection and civic rebuilding efforts, the new manual underscored the importance of earning trust through transparency. It stressed telling the truth even when the news was bad, bending over backward to avoid arresting and killing the wrong people, and persuading those among the enemy who were reconcilable to abandon the fight in return for concessions, incentives, and opportunity. It also (and this piece is often overlooked) called for relentlessly isolating and targeting extremists, those who will not reconcile. So as you add friends, you subtract enemies. Petraeus says, “The idea is to go to bed every night with fewer enemies than you had in the morning.” The manual not only galvanized a movement within the military but also became a national best-seller, the first army manual ever reviewed in The New York Times Book Review (and favorably at that).

When President Bush decided in late 2006 to change course in Iraq, replacing Rumsfeld with Robert M. Gates, there was, in Keane’s words, “near unanimity” in the White House that Petraeus was the man to take military command. Keane recalls giving Bush this cautionary advice: “Mr. President, you have to understand that he will be taking on his first four-star assignment, and as we all learn, there is a steep learning curve that comes with that. Going through that in a theater of war, where you are tremendously isolated, is difficult enough, but Petraeus, who has always enjoyed a supportive chain of military command, will not have that for the first time in his career. Iraq will be the most challenging job he’ll ever have in his life, and for the first time he has a completely unsupportive military chain of command.”

Petraeus went off to Baghdad in early February of 2007 with a mandate from the president to put counter-insurgency into practice. The surge, then, was not just an infusion of new troops. It was an infusion of new ideas. He took with him some of the scholars, military and civilian, who had helped him write the counter-insurgency manual. The assignment was a stark illustration of the difference between academia and the military. In academia you publish and subject your work to criticism and comment, and sometimes your ideas are shot down. It can be a humbling experience. In the military, you publish, and then you arm yourself for battle. If your ideas are wrong, you don’t just suffer criticism. People die.

And many did die implementing the surge. Deploying troops in small neighborhood combat outposts meant that American forces initially were exposed to more attacks. Casualties climbed in the spring of 2007 to among the highest levels of the conflict. Petraeus remembers many terrible moments in those early months. Colonel Peter Mansoor, a key member of the general’s brain trust, says, “Some nights, if they followed a day with multiple casualties, horrific car bombings, or nasty political fights, you could see the energy flow out of him. He didn’t complain, but you could see it in his manner, his facial expressions, his body language, his receptiveness to conversation. He became quiet, reflective, but then he would buckle down and just keep working. He never expressed any doubt that we would succeed, in public or in private. But, as for me, I sometimes had my doubts.”

Petraeus says he often heard the voice of his father in his inner ear: Results, boy. “I remember when I was the commander in Baghdad in the first summer of the surge,” he says, “and an old mentor of mine came over there, and it was really, really tough. We have forgotten how bad Iraq was, what it was like, in December of 2006, to have 53, on average, 53 dead bodies every 24 hours just in Baghdad, just from sectarian violence. Here we were in the late spring, early summer, of 2007, and my old mentor put his arm around me and said, ‘Dave, you know, you have a message problem over here.’ And I said, ‘Sir, with respect, we have a results problem here.’”

Petraeus does not talk easily about this aspect of the Iraq experience. He is not inclined to tell stories, particularly about himself. But asked to reflect on those hard months, he immediately invokes something he once read about Ulysses S. Grant.

“It was at Shiloh, I think, where the forces under Grant had almost been driven into the river. And they’re literally there with their backs to the river after a very bloody first day. It’s raining. It’s dark. There is no place that has cover that Grant can go into because all of the buildings are full of casualties. The wounded are crying out in the night—amputations and everything else. So Grant’s sitting under a tree in a rickety old chair, and he’s got his slouch hat on, the rain is pouring off it, and he’s got a wet cigar in his mouth. Sherman stomps out of the dark and says, ‘Well, we’ve had the Devil’s own day today, Grant, haven’t we?’ And Grant looks at him, takes the cigar out of his mouth, and says, ‘Yep. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.’”

When Petraeus took command of American forces in Iraq, the departing commander was bitter and unhelpful. Petraeus says only that General Casey was “gracious,” but Colonel Mansoor recalls, “There was this sense from some members of General Casey’s team that we were the know-it-alls coming in to grade their homework.” Throwing it out the window is more like it, along with the book. Petraeus led by making sure that the biggest of his big ideas, “Secure the population and do it by living with the people,” was being taught down through the ranks, “echoed and re-echoed throughout the breadth and depth of the organization,” as he puts it. Every private on the street with an M16 had to know exactly what was expected of him. One of the things Petraeus expected was that his troops respect the rights of Iraqi citizens, even those under arrest and suspected of being active insurgents.

“One of our doctrines is: Live your values,” Petraeus says. “And there are two arguments for living your values. One is you have the moral obligation to do it. It is the right thing to do. If you don’t buy that, you have a practical reason to do it, because every time you violate it, you pay for it.” The damage done by Abu Ghraib, for instance, is permanent; he has called it a “nonbiodegradable” event. It undercuts the core objective, the trust and respect of the indigenous population. Petraeus says, “The human terrain is the decisive terrain.”

This means the battlefield was not confined by concrete barriers or defined by free-fire zones. The theater of operation was now the entire country, from the contentious halls of Iraq’s emerging government to an improvised market in a Baghdad slum. “Full Spectrum Operations” meant every resource would be brought to bear—not just the military but also civilian agencies, neighborhood militias, and every NGO with a stake in the outcome. That was the deeper meaning of Petraeus’s comment to Bush—what he had meant by “all-in.” Soldiers were drilled to present a kinder face to the Iraqi public—the old lady on her way to buy food, the taxi driver with a bad attitude, the disgruntled patriarch, the people who may have been hiding insurgents, even those who had been insurgents themselves. The Iraqi people were the prize.

Petraeus’s call sign in Iraq was “Lion Six.” There was still a trace of Squad Leader Six in his approach. But now, commanding on such a vast scale, the best he could hope for was to project an illusion of omnipresence. He was universally approachable, giving his e-mail address out to his company commanders, encouraging them to bring him their problems, and refusing to go to bed each night before “clearing his queue”—answering all the incoming. “This is hard but not hopeless,” he would say.

Each morning he presided over long briefings with commanders throughout the country. “That first meeting of the day was critical to how he led,” says Mansoor. “He would ask good questions. If someone was giving a PowerPoint presentation, he would make the presenter stop on nearly every slide. He would focus on specific things that he felt were important, if only symbolically. For instance, there was an electrical tower, Tower 57, which took us nine months to get repaired. The Iraqi repair crews kept getting ambushed. Petraeus would ask about that tower every week. I would not want to have been the poor captain who had the mission to fix it. But Petraeus saw Tower 57 as a symbol of a larger issue—repairing the electrical grid in order to give hope to the Iraqi people of a better life ahead. And Tower 57 got fixed.”

The tentative, hopeful trend that Petraeus reported to a skeptical Congress in September 2007 has continued. Monthly figures for Americans killed in Iraq fell steadily from a peak of 121 in May of that year, when the counter-insurgency strategy was implemented, to 4 in December of 2009. Violent attacks dropped off dramatically, by more than 90 percent. Basic utilities were restored countrywide, markets were opened, and life has gradually moved toward normal. There are still suicide bombings in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country. Al-Qaeda is still a disruptive presence. There are substantial political hurdles to be overcome before anyone will predict long-term stability. And, obviously, the definition of “Lick ’em” has changed from the naïve expectations early in the war. But as of this writing, President Obama plans to shift American troops out of combat missions and reduce their overall numbers substantially by the end of August, and no one expects all hell to break loose.

Earlier I mentioned that there might be a third reason why David Petraeus wears a complete history of achievement on his uniform. It’s my own conjecture. Petraeus himself had not given the matter much thought, until I asked him to. He e-mailed me this:

I think folks expect us to wear our ribbons, etc. I accepted that sometime back. As I think you know, there are innumerable requests for photo ops at events, and I try to be as accommodating as is possible, given time constraints. In fact, it is not uncommon for organizers to set up photo ops before events for their leaders and most prominent members (believe it or not, several senior Congressional members from both parties asked for photos behind closed doors in Sep 07 before the hearings).… Anyway, in the States, I think they’d send me back to the dressing room if I showed up without ribbons! And were I to go without ribbons at this point, the blogosphere would offer all kinds of interpretations! So, having been prompted to think about this, there it is.

Petraeus is acutely aware that one important aspect of command is theater: “Folks expect us to.” He has been a diligent caretaker of his own story. His life has been a performance. When he first led his troops into battle in Iraq, the writer Rick Atkinson rode alongside in the general’s Humvee (and afterward wrote a fine book, In the Company of Soldiers). For success to breed success, it must be seen and be heard. Much of his story has begun to undergo the slight embellishment and exaggeration that turn history into legend—dragging Joyce across the finish line—and this, too, contributes to his leadership. He is smarter, he is stronger, he is faster, he is more determined. He is “King David.” Once, in a heady and unguarded moment after an impressive ceremony in Iraq before 800 cheering sheikhs, he joked to a Washington Post reporter that sometimes it felt “like a combination of being the president and the pope.” He regrets that remark, which was turned into an embarrassing headline, but the Legend of David Petraeus now defines what an American military officer should be.

He enjoys an almost cultish following in some parts of the army. There’s even a miracle tale, all the better for being true. The story, widely disseminated on the Internet by admirers, tells how Petraeus, visiting a badly wounded lieutenant from the 101st Airborne named Brian Brennan, roused him from a three-week coma doctors had felt was hopeless by shouting from his bedside the unit’s Cherokee slogan, “Currahee!” Brennan stirred and sat up. The lieutenant had lost both of his legs to a bomb blast but recently went running with the general on prosthetic limbs.

Petraeus seemed not to fully understand his newfound stature when he discussed with Keane, late in 2007, what military assignment might come for him after his Iraq command. He told Keane that, among other jobs, he thought he might take over tradoc, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, and continue the work he had begun at Fort Leavenworth. Keane was taken aback. According to Bob Woodward in The War Within, he told Petraeus, “You have to understand who you are now and what’s happened to you. We haven’t had a general like you in a long time. You may not realize it, but you have more influence than any other military leader in this country right now.”

So far, Petraeus has used this heightened stature only to re-insert himself into the chain of command. He didn’t go to tradoc—he took over CentCom. His work involves close collaboration with the very people who publicly doubted him just a few years ago. The senator who complained that the general’s testimony defied belief, Hillary Clinton, invited Petraeus to her Washington home shortly before being sworn in as secretary of state. The two of them sat before her fireplace and over drinks tacitly agreed to forget past differences and return their relationship to one of mutual admiration. Vice President Biden now spends more time listening to Petraeus than lecturing him. The general says he understands that there was a need for “a sharper edge to the narrative” during the political campaign. With “the rear-view mirrors off the bus,” as he puts it, he has moved smoothly into the inner orbit of his former critics.

His relationship with Obama, in particular, has deepened. “I think the president has proven to be everything that everyone says he is,” Petraeus says. “Which is: exceedingly bright, very focused—and very competitive, by the way. My sense is that you don’t achieve all that he has without having that degree of competitiveness, but in an intellectual way. I mean, it’s not as if—he hasn’t challenged me to a basketball game.” The general’s competitive instincts can’t quite be suppressed: Petraeus adds that, although he has never been a good basketball player, he thinks he could take the president one-on-one, “provided we play full-court, a runner’s game.”

Petraeus had been frustrated when he wasn’t given a chance to answer Obama during the 2007 Senate hearings. He says he listened and listened, and then “it was ‘Oh, sorry, Mr. Chairman, my time is up,’ you know, ‘I’ll yield to the gentleman from such and such.’ I sat there leaning forward and thinking, I can answer that question.”

When Obama the presidential candidate visited Iraq, Petraeus got his chance. “We laid out our campaign plan for him,” he recalls. “We said, ‘Here’s the mission, here are the objectives,’ in a more granular fashion. ‘Here is what we set out to accomplish over the course of the last year, and, by the way, we actually accomplished the vast majority of it.’ We didn’t adjust it—this was the original campaign plan. And it took some time to lay that out. But that was very valuable time because we had over two hours, and it was very good. You know, he’s an academic at heart as well, I think, a little bit of a kindred spirit who likes to bang ideas around and challenge them and look at them every which way. And so I thought it was very good. We also had a private moment at the end of it that was candidly very reassuring to me as well.” He will not elaborate.

As president, Obama has generally stuck with Petraeus on Iraq, and when it came time to re-assess the war in Afghanistan, Petraeus was one of the key voices in the room. He had been startled by what he discovered in Afghanistan after taking over at CentCom. “We compared what we’d built in Iraq to what we’d had in Afghanistan,” Petraeus says, “and it wasn’t even a pale carbon copy of what you need to conduct a fully resourced, comprehensive counter-insurgency. You know, with an engagement cell to support reconciliation, with a finance cell to go after financing of the enemy—all these different elements that you have to have. A really robust detainee-operations task force, a rule-of-law task force, an energy-fusion cell—all these other sort of nonstandard missions that are very important.”

Obama began by questioning all of the assumptions behind continued American involvement in Afghanistan. He ended by endorsing a request for 30,000 additional troops, a battle plan drafted by the commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley A. McChrystal. McChrystal had run the counterterrorism mission in Iraq under Petraeus and reports directly to him today. By design, McChrystal took the public lead in presenting the plan. Behind the scenes, in a series of 10 White House review sessions, it was Petraeus who often explained and defended it. “He was, after all, the only person in the room who had actually done something like this,” said one person involved in the process. To put the matter starkly, Petraeus now “owns” Afghanistan the way he owns the surge in Iraq.

At the end of November, when Obama committed to a surge in troops, he pushed Petraeus to accelerate its pace. He wanted results to come sooner rather than later, so that he could offer the American people some prospect of an end. But the course he embraced was, in essence, the Iraq strategy he had opposed three years earlier—Obama had come full circle. And whatever the results in the short term, the strategy pre-supposes that America will be present in force for years to come. Successful counter-insurgency comes in only one size: long.

During his nationally televised address at West Point, on December 1, in which the president announced his decision, the camera panned down to the audience to briefly catch a smiling Petraeus in his dress uniform, ablaze with decorations. On the flight back to Washington that night aboard Air Force One, Obama emerged from his quarters in the front of the plane, walked down the aisle, and singled out the general before everyone on board to thank him for his help.

His headquarters may be in Tampa, but Petraeus seems to spend more time these days in the air than on the ground. He travels everywhere with two laptops, one for secure communications, the other for everything else. As he did in Baghdad, the general clears his e-mail queue every day. Even notably unimportant queries are usually answered quickly. One night I e-mailed him a list of questions. Among other things, I asked for a clear definition of his responsibilities. He responded within minutes, flying high over the Atlantic through time zones already well past midnight, with especially expansive answers, concluding with a summary of his schedule over the previous few days. In order to avoid further complicating a dense passage, I’ve left the acronyms unexplained. Petraeus wrote:

This week alone, for example, I hosted the Central and South Asian Chiefs of Defense Staff for a conference in Washington, at which Adm Mullen, USD-P Flournoy, and LTG Lute (WH) spoke, among others. I then flew through the night to get to Brussels early Tues morning for a meeting with Adm Mullen, GEN Kayani of Pakistan, Gen McChrystal, ADM Olson (socom), and VADM LeFever (our senior military officer in Pakistan) (don’t report this meeting until the article, pls), as well as with our Ambassador to nato and the Australian chod. We’re now back on the plane flying through the night to get back to DC for meetings at the WH and on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, followed by hosting a conference in Washington for Ambassadors of the AOR countries and of the countries with forces in the AOR (at which Ambassador Dennis Ross and Sen George Mitchell, among others, will speak). We do both conferences (and others) annually in DC, and we also host a conference for all the US Ambassadors in the region in Bahrain. Anyway, that gives you a flavor of how we approach this.

I thanked him and expressed surprise, not so much at how crowded his schedule was but that he had taken the time to write such full answers to all of my questions.

“You caught me at a good time,” he wrote back minutes later. “I’m just trying to stay awake to be able to combat jet lag tomorrow.”

From his command at CentCom, Petraeus may not hold the highest rank, but he is without a doubt the most influential military officer in America. His conquest of the U.S. Army is complete. He has a deep and devoted following in the ranks—his “counter-insurgency nation.” His doctrines now shape the way we fight, and because his position allows him to select and promote the institution’s next generation of colonels and generals, his values and ideas are shaping the army’s future.

He still steers the Iraq war, and he oversees the developing strategy for routing the Taliban in Afghanistan. The all-out assault on Marjah in February demonstrated strict Petraean principles in action. It was announced months in advance, which gave civilians a chance to either dig in or clear out. There were civilian deaths, tragedies that were clearly inadvertent and which McChrystal publicly apologized for, but the numbers were a fraction of those common in such urban assaults. By so carefully reducing the potential for civilians to be caught in the crossfire, the offensive all but eliminated what is, perhaps, the strongest incentive for Taliban troops to stand and fight: to exploit such deaths to turn public opinion against America. Since they could not hope to defeat the onslaught of allied and Afghan troops, the insurgents largely melted away. The end result was the same: the allied and Afghan forces reclaimed Marjah, but they did so with relatively little bloodshed. This approach runs directly counter to military convention, which prizes secrecy and surprise. It recognizes that the real battle is not chasing the Taliban out of the city or underground but winning the population, a process which can begin only after the city has been retaken. American commanders have already announced an even larger offensive for later this year, on Kandahar.

In addition to these two major wars, Petraeus is responsible for the politically delicate security-assistance efforts in Pakistan and Yemen. He is responsible for preparing military options in the event that a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear ambitions moves beyond threats and sanctions. He has brought an expansive vision to his new job, just as he has done in the past, pushing the Obama administration to rethink its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the broader context of the region. He relies on the cooperation of Arab nations, and so must cope with their unhappiness over America’s inability to make progress in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. It is such a direct problem for Petraeus that he raised the question with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs last year of whether the Palestinian territories should eventually be added to his command portfolio—they currently reside with EuCom (the European Command). Ultimately, Petraeus did not recommend such a change, but the general’s thinking reportedly has begun to influence the Pentagon’s overall approach to the issue. Petraeus’s primary focus, however, is on routing al-Qaeda. Far more intensely than commanders were able to in the past—recall those computer screens in his office—Petraeus oversees the ever expanding effort to target and kill Islamist extremists, using everything from pilotless drones to submarine-launched cruise missiles. He still tries to go to bed every night with fewer enemies than he woke up with.

“In some respects it’s the kind of job where you can say, ‘Gosh, this is something I have dreamed of doing my whole life,’ and it is. And if there weren’t real people out there really fighting and really dying, you’d just be—you would be exhilarated,” Petraeus says. “But the fact is there are real people fighting and dying, and it is a deadly serious endeavor. On tough days that really sets in.”

You would not want to be at war with General David Petraeus. He plays to win, and it’s personal. Last fall it was revealed that, months earlier, he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The general had quietly undergone two months of radiation treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, maintaining his full schedule throughout—“It was like it never happened,” said one of his aides. And that’s the way the general planned to leave it—as if it had never happened—until a reporter from The New York Times got a tip and asked a direct question.

So his Central Command staff in Tampa drafted a terse press release, laying out the bare facts. As with everything that comes from his office, Petraeus reviewed the statement. It disclosed the diagnosis and the successful treatment, and explained that the general had declined to announce his ailment because it was a “private matter.” But the general added a line of his own. He added one more reason for not disclosing his condition: “to avoid giving al-Qaeda hope.”

The staff balked.

“Absolutely not, sir” was the gist of the response from his public-relations advisers.

“Leave it in,” ordered the general. “End of discussion.”

There was only one avenue of appeal. The staff felt strongly enough about it to send the release to the only authority in-house capable of overruling the general. Holly Petraeus returned it without comment, but with her husband’s addition deleted.

The print version of this article notes that General Petraeus “requested” that CentCom’s authority be expanded to include the Palestinian territory. The online version has been amended to reflect a fuller and more accurate account.

Mark Bowden is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.