General Accounting.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 24-SEP-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Last December, the Army released a document entitled "Counterinsurgency," an updated field manual designed to guide United States forces to victory in guerrilla wars. "Legitimacy Is the Main Objective" is one heading above its thematic advice. To defeat a resistance force in irregular war, the manual observes, it is essential to recognize "that political factors have primacy" and may account for as much as four-fifths of the struggle--an insight ascribed, a little showily, to a strategist on Mao Zedong's central committee.

The general who oversaw the field manual's rewriting, David H. Petraeus, was dispatched to Iraq upon its completion in order to apply its principles to one of the less credible wars in American history. Since then, 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...

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