aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, July 27, 2007

On David Petraeus

More from the NYTimes Book Review coming this weekend. In a major look at George Bush’s war on terror, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard’s Samantha Power says, “The book to begin with in looking for a revised 21st-century strategy is, unexpectedly, the landmark U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.”

The leading architect of the manual was David Petraeus, then a lieutenant general, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 and took responsibility for governing Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, immediately thereafter. He is now the overall American commander in Iraq. Petraeus emphasized economic and political development and is said to have asked his soldiers, “What have you done for the people of Iraq today?” He worked with another military man who also saw that his job would have to be more than strictly military - Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who commanded the First Marine Division during the initial invasion and then in 2004 returned to help stabilize Anbar Province. His division motto was “No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy - First Do No Harm.” In February 2006, while the new counterinsurgency doctrine was still being drafted, and while international criticism of American military excesses mounted, Petraeus invited journalists, human rights lawyers, academics and practitioners of counterinsurgency to Fort Levenworth to vet a draft, initiating what participants characterized as one of the most open and productive exchanges of ideas they had ever witnessed.