Steve Coll: Petraeus is not Bush's lackey, but ...

… Petraeus is not Bush’s lackey; his views of the Iraq war overlap with the President’s, but they arise from very different antecedents. In 1987, Petraeus completed a three-hundred-and-thirty-seven-page doctoral dissertation at Princeton entitled “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. In his conclusion, Petraeus argued against the Army doctrine that had been reaffirmed in reaction to the Vietnam War—an “all or nothing” approach, as he labelled it, which held that the United States should enter wars only with overwhelming force and with clear, achievable objectives that would enjoy public support. This was later called the Powell Doctrine, for General Colin Powell, its practitioner until he endorsed the inadequately manned invasion of Iraq four and a half years ago.

Petraeus saw the doctrine as potentially unrealistic because small, nasty wars—where there would be no “clear-cut distinction between peace and war”—seemed to him the coming trend. He quoted approvingly former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger’s belief that the United States should not limit itself to fighting only “popular, winnable wars.” To prepare for such a future, Petraeus argued for rebuilding America’s counterinsurgency capabilities.

He observed that American public opinion often wavers during a protracted conflict, and he quoted General George C. Marshall’s admonition that “a democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War”; his tone betrayed a hint of professional irritation at weak-kneed tendencies among the people. Still, Petraeus could see that not all counterinsurgencies are easily won, no matter the public’s fortitude. He cited in particular the Soviet Union’s brutal struggles in Afghanistan:

After all, if a country with relatively few public opinion concerns or moral compunctions about its tactics cannot beat a bunch of ill-equipped Afghan tribesmen, what does that say about the ability of the United States —with its domestic constraints, statutory limitations, moral inhibitions, and zealous investigative reporters—to carry out a successful action against a guerrilla force?

Academic questions of that kind require field work to answer; two decades later, Petraeus has his controlled experiment, and his research is remarkably well funded. It is far from clear, however, whether he is asking all the right questions....