How Petraeus Quietly Stoked the Fires Of Sectarian War Without Getting Burned

Introduction

 The discovery of his affair with Paula Broadwell has ended David Petraeus' career, but the mythology of Petraeus as the greatest US military leader since Eisenhower for having engineered turnarounds in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars lives on.

A closer examination of his role in those wars reveals a very different picture, however.

As this four-part series shows, Petraeus represents a new type of military commander, whose primary strength lay neither in strategy nor in command of combat, but in the strategic manipulation of information to maintain domestic political support for counterinsurgency wars of choice, while at the time enhancing his own reputation.

The series shows how Petraeus was engaged from the beginning of the Iraq war in creating a myth about himself as a commander with unique ability to defeat insurgents, that he had failed in his first two commands in Iraq and that he did not believe that war was winnable.

But the account also shows that Petraeus seems to have eventually begun to believe his own myth of himself as successful counterinsurgency strategist. The shift from deception of others to self-deception is the dominant theme of his command of the war in Afghanistan.

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