Click here for a larger, annotated guide to General Petraeus' medals

It was the most eagerly awaited testimony to Congress by a wartime general for 40 years, the defining moment in a conflict marked by missteps and bad planning.

But when he opened his mouth to deliver his pivotal assessment of the Iraq surge, with the politicians ready and tens of millions of Americans watching on television, General David Petraeus abruptly stopped. After weeks of frenzied anticipation, his microphone was broken.

Technicians inside the world’s most powerful legislative body ran around in blind panic. Flustered television anchors were left scrambling. And not for the first time, Americans wondered if the man sent to Baghdad by President Bush to turn around the war can prevail when faced with such incompetence at home.

General Petraeus: The Times interview

'What sustains you is the Iraqis who are incurring enormous risk to try to achieve the vision of a new nation in an ancient land'

BACKGROUND

• Comment: General Petraeus polarises Washington

• Q&A: General Petraeus and the surge

• Petraeus dresses right for critical moment

• America can’t just walk away, US general insists

• New US general will copy British 'softly-softly' style

Related Links

• Turning point for America in Iraq

“Would someone please fix the microphone?” barked the gravel-voiced Ike Skelton, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the man responsible for the unfolding chaos.

“Is it fixed yet?”, he asked moments later. “Let’s get it fixed.” Mr Skelton called a five-minute recess.

When he finally delivered his opening statement, one thing was soon clear. If this was a decisive moment in the Iraq war, it was also the defining moment in the career of General David Petraeus.

For weeks, analysts had been comparing him to two other generals called to give wartime testimony to sceptical congressmen, and asking the question: will Petraeus turn out to be a Ulysses Grant - who rescued the flagging fortunes of the Union Army in the Civil War – or a William Westmoreland, who was brought to Washington in 1967 to shore up support for the Vietnam War, and whose career ended in failure?

But with General Petraeus, a warrior-scholar with a Princeton Phd and more political shrewdness than many of the congressmen before him, there was a feeling that we were witnessing not a Grant or Westmoreland, but a Colin Powell or even a Dwight Eisenhower – two military stars who went on to become Secretary of State and President respectively.

General Petraeus came before Congress faced with a hostile Democratic caucus, many sceptical Republicans, and with one antiwar group posting an advertisement in yesterday’s New York Times entitled: “General Petraeus or General Betray US?” Like many Democrats, the campaigning website Moveon.org accused him of being President Bush’s partisan hawker of a war strategy that he himself devised and thus would sell as a success.

He came armed with a bewildering array of statistics and charts. A chart showing the ratio of foreign and home-grown terrorists, insurgents and militia; a chart of ethnosectarian deaths; a chart of uncovered arms caches – 4,400 this year – a chart of car bomings and suicide attacks. He said that more than 2,500 al-Qaeda fighters had been killed this year.

General Petraeus also insisted at the outset that his assessment “has not been cleared by nor shared with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or the Congress”. But on several occasions he was interrupted by protesters, some of whom yelled: “Generals lie, children die!” They were quickly arrested. Cindy Sheehan, who became the face of the antiwar movement after her son died in Iraq, was arrested near the hearing room.

General Petraeus has for months shown the political and media savvy of a man who many believe has his eyes on a political career. Unlike Westmoreland, who was relentlessly upbeat about Vietnam in 1967, General Petraeus showed more sophistication.

“Innumerable challenges lie ahead,” he conceded. He gave warning of insurgents’ use of the internet to spread extremism. “Iraq’s problems will require a long-term effort.”

Statistics of war

“ Military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met

“ As we have gone on the offensive in former al-Qaeda and insurgent sanctuaries and as locals have increasingly supported our efforts, we have found a substantially increased number of arms, ammunition, and explosives caches

— 4,400 arms caches have been found and cleared since January – nearly 1,700 more than all of last year

— Sharp decline (about a third) of improvised explosive device attacks since June, possibly due to arms cache finds

“ The number of ethnosectarian deaths, an important subset of the overall civilian casualty figures, has also declined significantly since the height of the sectarian violence in December

— Overall decline by more than 55 per cent; in Baghdad, the decline has been almost 80 per cent

“ This dramatic decrease [in Anbar province] reflects the significance of the local rejection of al-Qaeda and the new found willingness of local Anbaris to volunteer to serve in the Iraqi Army and Iraqi police service

— Attacks in Anbar decreased from 1,350 in October 2006 to slightly over 200 this August

“ We have considerably reduced the areas in which al-Qaeda enjoyed sanctuary

— Detained senior Iraqi leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq

— Killed or captured nearly 100 key leaders and 2,500 rank-and-file members

Source: US Congress

Times Recommends

• Fish and chip shops ‘selling cobbler as cod’
• T in the Park festival at Kinross
• How to get Madonna’s Thighs