Critics charged that his earlier reliance on force had inflamed the insurgency in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad. It was seen as the prototype of what not to do.
Andrew Krepinevich, an influential military scholar and Pentagon consultant, said he became so concerned about Odierno's new assignment that he raised it with Petraeus.
Over dinner at Ft. Leavenworth, Krepinevich, a retired Army officer, said he thought the Army's best generals were leaving Iraq and those who remained were not up to the job.
"I got to Odierno and I said, 'I don't really understand why a guy who seemed to have so much trouble there the first time is going back in a key position,' " Krepinevich recalled. "Petraeus said to me, 'Well, I know Ray and I think he learned a lot from that experience.' "
Krepinevich says now: "Petraeus was right, and I was wrong."
Odierno arrived in Iraq for his first tour after nearly 30 years as an artillery officer, having spent his formative years in the Army's "heavy" force -- big, mechanized divisions that were preparing for a conventional war with the Soviets.
A native of Rockaway, N.J., Odierno graduated from West Point in 1976, just as the Army was consciously shedding the irregular-warfare skills it had acquired in Vietnam, vowing never to fight that kind of conflict again.
And it was Odierno's immersion in Cold War-era thinking that made all the more remarkable his metamorphosis into a skilled commander in an irregular war.
His own take
Odierno himself does not completely accept that narrative.
In an interview before he left Iraq in February, he acknowledged having made mistakes with the 4th Infantry Division.
But the mistakes he admitted to -- failing to reach out to local tribes, over-centralizing operations, overspending on big public works projects -- are not the ones his critics complained about, such as over-reliance on conventional weaponry and seemingly indiscriminate detention of military-aged men.
"I think where they get it a bit wrong is: Did we have to use some tough measures? Yes, because we were in an extremely tough area," Odierno said. "In order to secure the population, we had to use some tougher measures than others had to use. It's not that I was conventional in any way."
He admits, though, that the Ray Odierno who returned to Iraq in 2006 was not the same man who went to Iraq in 2003. "I've learned. . . . I've learned a lot," he said. "We've all learned."
