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29 June 2024

Stop Listening to David Petraeus

GREGORY DADDIS

Let’s be frank. David Petraeus never misses an opportunity to promote himself as a modern-day MacArthur, a genius in the art of war whose 2007 military campaign in Iraq is the gold-standard for aspiring strategists seeking to profit off the travesties of armed conflict.

It should come as no surprise then that the former general and CIA director weighed in recently with a didactic primer for Israeli civilian and military leaders overseeing one of the worst war-related calamities of the 21st century. Follow my counsel, Petraeus submits, and you too shall succeed, as did I, in turning around a failing war.

Last week Petraeus co-authored an opinion piece in Foreign Affairs with Harvard Kennedy School professor Meghan L. O’Sullivan and Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security. But make no mistake,this was no serious analysis of the ongoing Israeli conflict, rather a chance for the general himself to highlight his personal “successes” in Iraq and demonstrate their universal lessons to any conflict in the Middle East.

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