The Anti-McNamaraMike Rappaport

That's my name for General Petraeus. Petraeus is an intellectual whose rigorous and demanding mind is probably responsible more than anything else for the success of the surge. 

Petraeus should therefore be the hero of those in the academy, who are devoted to the beneficial effects of rigorous thinking.  But, of course, one finds few in academia who praise or trumpet the greatness of Petraeus.  How sad.  How pathetic. 

Petraeus is also the Ant-McNamara.  Defense Secretary Robert McNamara used his charts and numbers in an effort to win the war in Viet Nam, but his methods did not work.  His failure did much to discredit intellectual efforts at fighting the war.  But Patraeus showed the way.  His methods worked.  

I am waiting for McNamara's critics to point out the contrast with Petraeus.

This book, which is positively review by the New York Times, looks like an excellent place to start getting a clearer picture of the methods that went into the surge.  I hope to read it over the holidays.  Here is an excerpt from the review that portrays Petraeus as the rigorous intellectual:

The ­55-year-old general is a superachiever who took on all the toughest training assignments and came away with the ­medals, a perfectionist who demands as much from others as from himself and a deeply reflective figure — he has a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton — who continually adapts to the lessons of experience. Petraeus puts no special store by his gut intuitions; in Iraq, he surrounded himself with junior officers as analytical, and as driven, as he is. Robinson singles out as his greatest gift not leadership but “intellectual rigor,” which compelled him “to mount a sustained effort to understand the problem.”

Comments

[SotS]

Wait a minute . . . I thought being intellectually rigorous was a characteristic of elites, and a sign of being out of touch with "Real America."

[Elena]

*dry* SotS, I think we can safely say that rigorous intellectualism is an elite characteristic, not a characteristic of the elite. Subtle different there...

[enemyofthepeople]

Apparently it is not valued by the typical blog commenter.