Part 1: How Petraeus Created the Myth of His Success

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http://truth-out.org/news/item/12997-how-petraeus-created-the-myth-of-his-success



Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, right, holding a meeting with community leaders in Mosul, Iraq on April 30, 2003.


How Petraeus Created the Myth of His Success
Tuesday, 27 November 2012 17:43
By Gareth Porter, Truthout | Report

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 will show, 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 will show 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 knew he had failed in his first two commands in Iraq and that he did not believe that war was winnable.