I see that the main internet boosters for David Petraeus as GOP savior have lashed out me for speaking ill of the prospect.  Allow me therefore to knock this idol down.

The “surge” was a great tactical success at the expense of strategy.  There are many analogous situations in the history of warfare.  Perhaps the most relevant was the Russian offensive against Austria in the spring of 1916, which led to impressive tactical gains that essentially destroyed the Habsburg military as a serious force in the war, but put such stress on the Russian army that it completely collapsed, and then we got the Revolution.  Also similar were the French offensive later that year whose stresses led to the 1917 mutiny, and the German last rally in the winter of 1918 which led directly to their losing the war.

No, Petraeus is not a neocon, and therein lay the tragedy.  He was a disciple of H.R. McMaster, who wrote the definitive indictment of the New Frontier men and how they got us into Vietnam Dereliction of Duty.  And yet he assented to just such a folly when he agreed to execute Bush’s orders to kick the can down the road to Obama by simply containing the violence, perhaps in great measure thinking that he was doing his patriotic duty to keep Bush pacified for the sake of the army and the country, but in at least equal measure to serve his political ambitions, so readily stoked by my interlocutors.

A truly great man would have said to Bush what Robert E. Lee said upon being offered the chance to command Lincoln’s army, as he described it in shock, to invade his own country – “I can not lead it, I will not lead it.”