Doctor Brainiac's War

Thomas Ricks has a Washington Post Story on the brain trust General David Petraeus has assembled to advise his Iraq strategy:

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals -- including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders -- in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.

Army officers tend to refer to the group as "Petraeus guys." They are smart colonels who have been noticed by Petraeus, and who make up one of the most selective clubs in the world: military officers with doctorates from top-flight universities and combat experience in Iraq.

The concept cannot be faulted. The dumb guys have screwed this up, so maybe it's time to let the smart guys try. There are two huge potential problems, however. The first is that the smart guys won't really get to run the show. The split command structure, where independent Iraqi and American generals will be calling the shots, looks like a recipe for disaster. If the Iraqi government isn't backing this effort, failure seems assured. The second problem is the pervasive feeling that whatever Petraeus can do, it will be too little and too late.

But there is widespread skepticism that even this unusual group, with its specialized knowledge of counterinsurgency methods, will be able to win the battle of Baghdad.

"Petraeus's 'brain trust' is an impressive bunch, but I think it's too late to salvage success in Iraq," said a professor at a military war college, who said he thinks that the general will still not have sufficient troops to implement a genuine counterinsurgency strategy and that the United States really has no solution for the sectarian violence tearing apart Iraq.

"It's too late to make a difference in Iraq," agreed Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University expert on terrorism who has advised the U.S. government on the war effort.

Read the story though. These guys are an impressive bunch. Maybe they can do something. We can still hope.

In the meantime, a Republican filibuster has blocked debate in the Senate, so no action to slow or shutdown "the surge" is imminent.

On the downside, the dumbest guy of them all is still "the decider."

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