Andreas Jeninga/The Hoya Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the invasion of Northern Iraq, spoke on Monday.

Major General David Petraeus, former commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division, spoke about the techniques used to rebuild Northern Iraq, including the major city of Mosul, in the chaos immediately following the Iraq war during a speech Monday.

Petraeus, who held a fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University in 1995, played a major role during the invasion of Iraq last year, sweeping from Kuwait through Baghdad to Northern Iraq.

Petraeus spoke of the techniques he used to rebuild Northern Iraq, and the city of Mosul, in the chaos immediately following the war. He also described the way that successes had been glossed over when reviewing what had been accomplished in Iraq.

“Our sense upon returning from Iraq about a month ago is that there is still a great lack of appreciation and understanding for the scope, the complexity and the magnitude for what our leaders and troopers did,” Petraeus said to a crowd of 75 students in McShain Lounge.

He highlighted the ability of the army to utilize the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, a fund of $57 million in Northern Iraq, to win the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi citizens.

This money was used to provide services in Iraq, from big projects such as the reopening of Mosul University to filling potholes and running an “Iraqi Idol” TV show, modeled on the popular show “American Idol.”

Petraeus identified three different elements in his region that fought against his force.

“We have the former regime elements, we had criminals and we had extremists,” he said.

While he considered the former members of Hussein’s regime the most numerous at the beginning, Petraeus said they “gradually chipped away at them,” noting the success in killing Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay.

Petraeus also reported battling with domestic and foreign extremist groups in Iraq, “the domestic [were] generally Ansar-al-Islam, the foreign [were] small numbers of al Qaeda and others.”

Petraeus commended local Iraqi organizations for turning in weapons to coalition forces.

“They started out voluntarily,” Petraeus said. “We did give them rewards over time.”

Iraqi defense forces were used to guard ammo caches that coalition forces did find. Some of the ammo dumps were “massive . [one was] 35 miles around.

Petraeus spoke of the importance of achieving “early wins” in Northern Iraq to build the confidence of the local population. He provided a timeline of the 101st’s initial few days in Northern Iraq, listing their quick successes.

“We determined very quickly that we needed to get Iraqis to help us,” he said. Because of this, Petraeus held elections astonishingly quickly to an advisory body called the Province Council. He said that those delegates in the Province Council, “elected the governor . who is still in that position, and doing a very fine job.”

In addition to revitalizing civil society, Petraeus remarked on the importance of supporting the economy of the region under his control.

“We got businesses reopened . rebuilt some bridges right away, got the school system going again by fits and starts,” he said. “Our soldiers eventually underwrote the rebuilding of some 500 schools.”

Since the Hussein regime kept a totalitarian grip on the smallest domestic affairs of the state, many basic decisions fell to the 101st Airborne Division, rather than private enterprise, Petraeus said.

“Believe it or not, we had to help broker the harvest accords in mid-May,” he said, “[We had to negotiate] the percentage of the wheat and barley that was kept by the landowners and the farmers.”

Throughout his speech, Petraeus emphasized the success the military had in winning legitimacy among the people of Northern Iraq with the discretionary funds they were given.

“Fifty-seven million dollars – that’s how much we were able to spend,” he said. “That is what enabled our soldiers to enable Iraqis to do projects as the ministries stood back up and started funneling money back into the provinces, which took some time.”

Since the 101st was in control of Northern Iraq before the rest of U.S. forces had taken Baghdad, this money provided the funds to start small projects and win public support for coalition forces. “Eventually we facilitated over 5,000 projects,” he said. “The Iraqis did it, we just enabled it.”