Remember this man Son. He will be remembered as one of the great thinkers of the current age, a warrior monk, who thinks fights negotiates and wins. Notice also how politicians actually create more problems and do not allow problems to be resolved. The sections around the negotiations with Petraeus and Obama just show how the destiny of nations is dependent upon some idiot sitting in the White House. One of the reasons why I hate the uk getting into foreign entanglements. Not because its needed but because I know we will screw it up, leave hundreds killed and thousands injured, cost money and really not solve the problem. And we don't learn. The uk has been getting entangled in these wars for the past 1000 years. And what did we get for those wars in every continent since the centuries ? Look around you. We are the same old same old with millions of Brits lying dead and mouldering in thousands of cemeteries around the world. Just read about how the British graves in Lucknow dating back to 1857 which mum wrote about are going to be demolished for a train line.
150 years afterwards, what will people say about bush or Obama's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? When more soldiers died outside combat than in it? Such a fruitless exercise.
But wars will happen as long as men have penis's and need to wave it around to show who is the bigger man.
So back to Petraeus. Learn from how he fights the insurgents and terrorists. Profit from the stupid decisions taken by politicians who lead countries to war. Just because they are stupid doesn't mean that you have to be stupid as well. Don't ever buy defence stocks. Stocks which rely on stupidity of people don't work out very well son.
It would be interesting to see how Petraeus career pans out. I'm wondering if the republicans will pick him?
Love
Baba
Warrior Petraeus by Thomas Powers | The New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/07/warrior-petraeus/?pagination=false
David Petraeus; drawing by James Ferguson
Former General David Petraeus, now retired from the United States Army and unemployed, had been a professional soldier for thirty years before he commanded troops in combat. The year was 2003, the place southern Iraq. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein was only a few days old when Petraeus concluded that the scrambling retreat of the Iraqi army was not going to be the whole of the story.
“Tell me how this ends,” he remarked to a reporter embedded with Petraeus’s 101st Airborne Division, heading for Baghdad. “Eight years and eight divisions?”
Army folklore says “eight years and eight divisions” was General Matthew B. Ridgway’s answer when asked what it would take to rescue the French from defeat in Indochina in 1954. No president who was thinking straight—certainly not Dwight David Eisenhower—would ever commit so large a force for so long a time to anything less than a matter of the first importance. Survival of the French colonial regime did not come close. What Petraeus was saying was, now we’re in for it.
Open-ended wars—getting over them, staying out of them, stumbling into them—were the constant theme of Petraeus’s life as a solider. He had been a high school teenager in the mid-1960s when General William Westmoreland was playing tennis two or three times a week in Saigon, where his formal title was Commander of the United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam, or COMUSMACV. His preferred courts were at Le Cercle Sportif, a private sports club near the Saigon River, built by the French colonial regime in the 1890s. It was there in March 1966, while the army under Westmoreland’s command was climbing toward its ultimate peak of 540,000 men, that the general suffered his only wound during four years of war—a fractured wrist suffered when he fell on the court.
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