By SusanUnPC
cross posted from No Quarter

Last night, I cracked open the Sept. 24 issue of The New Yorker my daughter brought me. Every time I spot a commentary by Steve Coll in a New Yorker index, I race to it. The man can write; his witty, subtly sarcastic prose is packed tight with information and observations. Take these gems from Sept. 24’s “General Accounting”:

… Petraeus, perhaps the most scholarly American officer ever to wear four stars, has been preoccupied by a political imperative-justifying the “surge” of thirty thousand additional troops who accompanied him to Baghdad. The General, a fitness compulsive who excels at pushups, has given much time to hosting congressional delegations and providing journalists with interviews, which he often conducts amid the stirring atmospherics of his airborne command helicopter. This summer, Petraeus crafted a campaign to publicize signs of progress he claimed to see in Iraq, and it became clear that he regarded America’s restive democracy as a theatre in his counterinsurgency operations.

By the time he returned to Washington last week to deliver a flinty and unrevealing report on the war, the General’s achievements on the Iraqi front appeared, at best, to amount to a muddle, but his success at forestalling war skeptics in Congress looked more impressive. …

Further down in the piece, Coll dissects Petraeus’s dismissal of the Powell Doctrine (which recommends we “enter wars only with overwhelming force and with clear, achievable objectives that would enjoy public support”) and Petraeus’s “three-hundred-and-thirty’seven-page doctoral dissertation at Princeton entitled A-The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam,- a lucid and subtle review of civil-military relations in the United States from the Korean War until the mid-nineteen-eighties”:

read more at NO QUARTER