COMMENTARY has posted early an article from next month’s issue by historian Arthur Herman (author of The Idea of Decline in Western History), entitled “How to Win in Iraq — and How to Lose.” 

It is an extraordinary description of the fourth-generation military doctrine that Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the author of the U.S. Army’s latest counterinsurgency field manual and now as commander of American ground forces in Iraq, is now using, placed in an historical and political context.

It needs to be read in conjunction with the story about Gen. Petraeus’s progress that appeared in the New York Post yesterday.  A lot more is going on than simply a “surge.”