If General Petraeus Had Read "War And Peace"

by Hugh Fitzgerald (April 2009)

But he also knows that his generals will, because they are generals, want to fight. Not fighting, especially in your own country against an invader, not defending your own capital, does not normally make sense. So Kutuzov lets them do it, lets the Russians fight at Borodino. The battle was inconclusive, though there were heavy casualties on both sides. But the Battle of Borodino, thanks to a poem by Lermontov that is memorized by all Russian schoolchildren, has entered the Russian version of history as a great victory.

And even at the time, Kutuzov’s generals could be proud of their willingness to engage the mightiest army ever assembled by the mightiest power in Europe. And now Kutuzov could try things his way, obtain victory his way.

How would the example of Kutuzov helped to redirect the American effort in Iraq, once it was clear to everyone that there no weapons of mass destruction to be found?

When Napoleon’s Grande Armee left Russia, and retreated across the border with fewer than 40,000 troops out of an original 600,000. It was the most spectacular defeat, inflicted by a general whose “wise passivity” prevailed over the advice of his clamoring generals, in modern history. Save for the losses at Borodino, the Russian military remained largely intact. Compare that with the two trillion dollars, in a time of great need, already spent or committed, in Iraq, and think of the sums now being spent in Afghanistan, and what that will do to the readiness of the American army, or even to the weapons systems it wished to buy, and will now be cancelled. 

A little Kutuzovshchina (Kutuzovism) might be just the ticket for West Point cadets, and Fort Leavenworth colonels, and for Pentagon generals, and even, one might suggest, for civilian leaders in Congress and the White House. One more reason to favor leaders who are well-read.

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