General Accounting.(The Talk of the Town)

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 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. Petraeus has arguably made himself more important to the future of Iraq's war than has the lame-duck President he serves--a situation that President Bush, understandably, seems pleased about. The General was tense and uncharismatic during his congressional testimony, yet he exuded integrity; after his second day at the witness table, the Times felt compelled to publish a graphic annotating his medals.

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"; ...