Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge Read Free Book Online

above the river. The sturdy, nineteenth-century brick houses and manicured lawns give the place the feel of a Midwestern college, although the uniformed student body, Civil War cannons, and equestrian statues were a reminder of the place’s martial purpose. A stint running Fort Leavenworth was seen as something of a career killer—or at least not the place to be if you wanted to go on to become a four-star combatant commander or Army chief of staff. In October 2005, Lieutenant General David Petraeus began a new assignment commanding the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. Petraeus had returned to the United States after two and a half years in Iraq, first as commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division, then as the head of the Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq, which was charged with training Iraqi security forces. His predecessor at Fort Leavenworth, General William Wallace, had been promoted to the unglamorous job of running U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, which oversaw the service’s schools and training facilities.
    Just a few months after Petraeus arrived at Fort Leavenworth, things took a dramatic turn for the worse in Iraq. On February 22, 2006, bombers struck the al-Askari mosque in Samarra. The mosque was a major Shia shrine, where the earthly remains of the tenth and eleventh imams were buried, and the attack, orchestrated by al-Qaeda in Iraq, had a very deliberate aim of starting a full-blown civil war in Iraq. In the weeks following the Samarra mosque bombing, a wave of sectarian reprisals swept Iraq. During one thirty-hour period alone, eighty-six bodies were found dumped on the street in Baghdad, with the bodies of many victims bearing signs of gruesome torture. Neighborhoods of the capital were being systematically ethnically cleansed. 4
    News of the Samarra mosque bombing reached Fort Leavenworth in late February of 2006, while Petraeus was hosting a conference to review the first draft of FM 3-24, the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual. The document was supposed to be much more than a professional handbook: It was supposed to serve as a template for reforming the Army, and fixing Iraq in the process. It was also intended to launch a broader conversation about reinventing government. The meeting, convened by Petraeus and Sarah Sewall of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was a chance to test-market the new counterinsurgency document to the broader foreign policy community. Representatives of other government agencies, the human rights community, think tanks, and even a few journalists were invited to offer critiques.
    Work had begun in earnest on the new counterinsurgency manual in late 2005, when Conrad Crane, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who had graduated in the same West Point class as Petraeus (1974), brought together a small writing team to produce an early first draft. Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, the armor officer who wrote the influential Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam , was a member of the team. Colonel Peter Mansoor, the armored brigade commander who had administered parts of Baghdad in 2003 and 2004, would later help revise the final version of the document. But the most remarkable thing about the writing process was the amount of input that came from nonmilitary people. Harvard’s Sewall played a unique role.
    Sewall is not just a tenured academic but also a Pentagon and Washington policy insider. During the Clinton administration she served as the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance. Before that she served as senior foreign policy advisor to Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell on the Democratic Policy Committee and the Senate Arms Control Observer Group. Under Sewall’s leadership, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy had quietly emerged as