"David Petraeus was a decorated leader and strategic thinker. Why risk everything on an affair?"
David Petraeus was a decorated leader and strategic thinker. Why did he risk everything on an affair?
By Fred Kaplan|Posted Saturday, Nov. 10, 2012, at 3:52 PM ET
Among those who have long known Gen. David Petraeus, those who served under his command in wartime, sat with him in the White House Situation Room, or helped him rewrite Army doctrine at Fort Leavenworth, the most gnawing question about the scandalous affair that led to his resignation and doomed his career on Friday is this: How could he—this acclaimed leader and figure of rectitude—allow such a thing to happen?
Seen in context, the mystery, while shocking, is not so unfathomable.
Paula Broadwell, the woman with whom he had this affair, writes in her fawning biography of Petraeus that they first met when she was in graduate school at Harvard and he came to give a talk about counterinsurgency strategy. She approached him afterward and expressed interest in the subject; they exchanged cards. Soon, she decided to write a Ph.D. dissertation on his leadership style and, when he took command in Afghanistan, asked if she could come observe him in action. He agreed.
The key to this initial attraction was probably not sexual but rather biographical. Broadwell had once been a West Point cadet, like Petraeus. She'd had training as a parachutist, as Petraeus had in his youth.* She was obsessed with physical fitness, especially running, as was Petraeus. In short, regardless of gender, Broadwell was exactly the sort of aspiring officer-intellectual that Petraeus was keen to mentor.
The impulse was not unique to Petraeus. It grew out of the ethos of West Point’s social science department, where Petraeus had taught in the mid-1980s. The department, known as “Sosh,” was founded just after World War II by a visionary ex-cadet and Rhodes Scholar named George A. “Abe” Lincoln. Toward the end of the war, as the senior planning aide to Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall, Lincoln realized that the Army needed to breed a new type of officer to help the nation meet its new global responsibilities in the postwar era. This new officer, he wrote to a colleague, should have “at least three heads—one political, one economic, and one military.” He took a demotion, from brigadier general to colonel, so he could return to West Point and create a curriculum “to improve the so-called Army mind” in just this way: a social science department, encouraging critical thinking, even occasionally dissent.
Lincoln also set up a program allowing cadets with high scores in Sosh classes to go study at a civilian graduate school, with West Point paying the tuition. In exchange, the cadets, after earning their doctorates, would come back and teach for at least three years. Once they fulfilled that obligation, Lincoln would use his still-considerable connections in Washington to get them choice assignments in the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, a foreign embassy, or a prestigious command post.
Much More...interesting read at:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/11/david_petraeus_s_affair_with_paula_broadwell_why_did_an_accomplished_and.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Figuring out that the best way to handle the "extremists" in Iraq was to PAY them not to shoot at our guys/put IED's in the roads is not exactly genius-level thinking... it's simply how business is done there.
The Iraq fiasco is not over.. far from it.
