November 20, 2012--Generally Speaking

One thing pretty much everyone seems to agree about is that, though it turns out that he couldn't keep his pants zipped, David Petraeus was a terrific general. He may have tossed away his post-military career chasing a skirt, but when it came to modern warfare there was no one who did it better.

To me he was an utter disaster, just like almost all of his four-star colleagues since at least the Korean War.

General MacArthur was fired when he was the commander in Korea for disobeying orders, wanting to nuke Communist China; General Westmoreland, U.S. commander in Vietnam was relieved of his command because he phoneyed up the "body count" to make it look like we were winning when in truth he and we couldn't defeat the Vietcong; and before Petraeus took over in Iraq and then Afghanistan all his predecessors were relieved of duty for one form of ineffectiveness or another. Petraeus alone seemed to be successful and thus was adulated in the media and virtually worshipped in Congress and the White House by leaders of both parties.

From this, one can only conclude that until Dave Petraeus came along we had the bad fortune to have a parade of failures.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But, for certain, in most cases it was not the generals' fault.

The reason it was not entirely their fault is because, at its essence, they were all trained to fight "traditional" wars where opponents faced each other across the battlefield and one's enemy was either in plain sight or lurking near the lines of battle. But since Korea, we have been engaged in either civil wars or against indigenous insurgents and we don't have good models from our, or anyone's experience, in how to prevail in these asymmetric situations. The pitched battles and invasions of World War II provided no lessons when an enemy such as the Vietcong wore black pajamas and faded into the countryside when not attacking or, as in recent wars, deploying improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

General Petraeus was claimed to be the only one to have figured it out--how to prevail when the enemy are insurgents who fight in unorthodox ways. Massing troops and engaging in fixed battles has not gotten the job done from Korea to the present. Until Petraeus.

We didn't win the Korean (civil) War--it in effect ended in a stalemate that has persisted for nearly 60 years, and beginning with Vietnam, for the first time in American history, we lost or are losing a series of wars. Characterizing combat in Vietnam and then in Iraq and Afghanistan, we confronted insurgents who were and are for all intents and purposes  defending their country and religious culture from our preemptive invasions and occupations.

Ironically, the American Revolution was fought by us in insurgent ways. There were few classic battles and most of what we rebels did was retreat and occasionally hit and run when periodically confronting lines of Redcoats. But subsequently, when battling insurgents, we forgot the lessons from our own successful history. Or from any historical antecedents.

I am far from a military historian but it is my understanding that from at least our own revolution until the present day there are almost no instances of conventional armies defeating insurgents. Perhaps Britain's ability to put down the Brunei rebels in Malaysia in the 1960s is the one counter example.

With "shock and awe" the U.S. and our few allies in Iraq quickly overthrew the Sunni-dominated forces of Saddam Hussein and after some months captured and allowed the Shia to execute him. But during those months we began to face opponents who more and more fought in unconventional ways, hitting and running while using an improvised arsenal of IUDs and other forms of stealth attack. We did not have an answer to these tactics and, with months turning into years, ultimately thousands of Americans were killed and grievously wounded, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens.

One commanding general after another tried unsuccessfully to respond and all were summarily dismissed. Then along came General David Petraeus to save the day.

In his background, which in many ways became his foreground, was a spectacular academic (as opposed to combat) career.

He graduated from West Point in 1974 and later earned the General George C. Marshall Award as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College class of 1983 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In 1985 he earned an M.P.A. and PhD in international affairs from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and then from 1985-1987 he served as an assistant professor of international relations at the U.S. Military Academy. His doctoral dissertation was entitled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era." And if this wasn't enough studying for a soon-to-be-appointed combat general, in 1995 he completed a military fellowship at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service.

If one looks carefully at his resume, one cannot find a single instance during almost all of his career where he served or led troops in combat. His entire career prior to the war in Iraq was of one kind of staff assignment or another.

But in addition to his academic career there is one additional thing at which he excelled--as the person who literally wrote the book on how to wage war in asymmetrical ways, he was spectacular at personal politicking and impressing the media. There is perhaps no general since the Second World War who has had better press and been more adulated by sycophantic senators such as the three amigos, Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham, and the ever-hawkish John McCain.

The latter senator agitated for and collaborated on Petraeus' greatest claim to fame--the Surge in Iraq.

Stalled on the ground there, realizing we had overreached and incited a version of civil war, the Bush administration turned to General Petraeus to put the lessons he had gleaned from Vietnam to work in the Iraq theater. One lesson was that when faced with an indigenous enemy one needed to deploy the tools of counterinsurgency and apply overwhelming, concentrated force to the situation to break the will of the resistance. Thus the surge of more than 30,000 troops in Iraq's Western Anbar Provence, where Hussein's displaced Sunni rebels were holed up.

The strategy was proclaimed to have worked but a close look at why the Sunnis stopped attacking American forces reveals that it was less because of Petraeus' Surge than the fact that we bribed Sunni tribal leaders with tens of millions of dollars. Thus, the so-called Sunni Awakening could more appropriately have been called the Sunni Cash-Out.

Deemed to be a glowing success, with General Petraeus getting most of the credit, the newly-elected Barack Obama, in part attempting to demonstrate to the world that he was to be reckoned with--that he wasn't just an effete, dovish Democrat--called upon the general to take command in Afghanistan (after another four-start general, Stanley McChrystal, disgraced himself and was fired) and bring the Iraq surge strategy to another theater of combat. Under Petraeus-Obama this led to tripling down on the number of troops there and to the same result--initial claims that it was working followed shortly by the realization that nothing on the ground had changed. American and allied forces were still vulnerable to insurgent attacks and the only way to save face was to declare Mission Accomplished and get the hell out, which we already have done in Iraq and are in the process of doing in Afghanistan.

But in the meantime, with his still-glittering Ivy League PhD and a string of faux-victories, Petraeus got himself the hell out of the uncertain world of post-Vietnam combat and, in jacket and tie, was put in charge of the CIA.

But then along came Paula Broadwell and, as they say, the rest is a version of history.