Another reason to like David Petraeus

David Petraeus, the U.S. army commander of the Multi-National Force - Iraq, has always impressed me. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on post-Vietnam military conflict. He's struck me as a remarkably humble yet brilliant military leader. And now I have one more great reason to appreciate this very smart military leader.

Beyond the Cloister

Petraeus writes this really well-argued and open-minded case for the need for military personell and officers to pursue a civilian graduate school education outside of military-specific institutions.

It is an excellent argument and an excellent idea to be promoted by the highest ranking army officer in this war. It is with profound appreciation that I can read such a respected and high-ranking officer encouraging future officers to engage in such a serious, important, and valuable experience in their lives.

But then there is this little tid-bit that made it stick that this is the kind of guy that I might trust, more, if he had my back:

"In my own experience, I found the most valuable situations to be those in which exceedingly bright senior professors held views substantially different from my own. I developed a particular friendship with one such professor at Princeton, one of the country’s leading international legal scholars at the time—even though we truly saw the world through different lenses. In the end, we decided that we never disagreed on anything but substance.

I happened to be taking a course with him when the United States invaded the island of Grenada in 1983. Now, some of you will remember that the legal underpinnings for that action were not the most robust to have ever justified an American military operation. Indeed, it later turned out that U.S. officials had actually written the request for American intervention that the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States submitted back to the United States to get us to intervene against one of their own member states. Nor was the action anchored in the most rock solid of ground when it came to traditional norms associated with the just war concept. Nonetheless, I wrote a paper for that professor entitled, “The Invasion of Grenada: Illegal, Immoral, and the Right Thing to Do.” It was great fun to write, and decent enough to earn an “A” despite a conclusion I know the professor did not share."

Now that is a military commander that I could trust, more. That's the kind of guy I want having my back in a tight situation. And it is gratifying to me that a man of such a powerful, legally-bound, and serious insitution could be thoughtful enough to know the distinction between taking democratic rule seriously without taking legal matters more seriously than doing the right thing.

And people who know that doing the right thing is more important than doing the legal thing are the kind of people who I can trust.

Love,
Ben