Brainiac Brigade

Dripping with sweat in the Baghdad summer heat, surrounded by armed Sunnis who not long ago might gladly have killed him, Gen. David Petraeus smiled. He listened as a former insurgent leader, a onetime member of Saddam Hussein's security forces, listed the grievances that brought him over to the Americans' side against the jihadists—the senseless killings of garbagemen and shopkeepers, the booby-trapped corpses in the streets, the indiscriminate IED attacks. When the man finished, Petraeus invited him to air his complaints publicly; minutes later the ex-insurgent was being interviewed on an Arabic satellite channel, and the top U.S. officer in Iraq strode off through the dust while his entourage scrambled to keep up. "Now this is counterinsurgency, by God!" he later declared.

Is it? Petraeus should know, as the man who pulled together The Book on it: the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 4-23). There's just one problem—Iraq doesn't follow the book. The manual—highly touted as the basis upon which the surge of U.S. forces this year would be organized—deals with threats to a functioning government that enjoys broad-based legitimacy. That's scarcely what exists in Baghdad, says Sarah Sewall, director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights. A devout believer in winning hearts and minds, she worked closely with Petraeus on producing FM 4-23. "I would argue that Petraeus has done as good a job as humanly possible," she says. "But by the time he got to Iraq, I think the war was no longer fightable according to the counterinsurgency doctrine we drafted."

Instead, the likely centerpiece of Petraeus's testimony to Congress this week—the success of efforts to turn the Sunni tribes of Anbar province—is a marked departure from FM 4-23. Rather than solidifying loyalty to the central government, the new strategy concentrates on creating pockets of stability in the hopes that such loyalty will follow. Petraeus will admit that political progress in Baghdad is painfully slow. But his argument is that the Anbar strategy shows enough promise to justify delaying anything but token troop withdrawals until next spring. That many lawmakers seem inclined to give him the time is a sign of how much intellectual throw- weight Petraeus—a Princeton Ph.D.—carries. It also reflects a feeling that he, and the circle of close advisers he's gathered around him in Baghdad, are at least seeing Iraq for what it is, not what their plans and schemes tell them it should be.

Every general has a network, a family of younger officers who have worked with him in previous assignments. But the brain trust Petraeus has assembled is an intriguing mix of former colleagues and maverick volunteers, linked by their intellectual firepower. As he began putting his staff together late last year, the joke inside the Pentagon was that no one without a Ph.D. would be eligible. "Commanders haven't [traditionally] tried to reach out and just pick the best minds—not the guys on the fastest track for promotion, not the 'best' soldiers, but the best minds with relevant experience," says Fred Kagan, a West Point graduate and sometime teacher there, who's now at the American Enterprise Institute. "It was wonderful to see that."

For his "XO"—executive officer—Petraeus called on Col. Peter Mansoor, 47, whose doctoral dissertation in history at Ohio State became a pathbreaking book on World War II, "The GI Offensive in Europe." Mansoor, who did his first Iraq tour in 2003 with the First Armored Division in Baghdad, got to know Petraeus about a year ago, while Mansoor was completing a fellowship with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. When Petraeus got his orders for Iraq, he persuaded Mansoor to come along. "You don't say no to a four-star," says Mansoor, a soft-spoken father of two. He helped put together the rest of the team, and now acts as Petraeus's consigliere and gatekeeper.

Two other colonels quickly signed up as well. One was Col. H. R. McMaster, 45, a courageous battlefield commander and another bright history Ph.D. His 1997 book, "Dereliction of Duty," is a merciless dissection of the Joint Chiefs' reluctance to tell truth to power in the Vietnam years. Another is Col. Michael Meese, 47, a West Point professor and head of the school's prestigious social-studies department. A Princeton graduate like Petraeus, he holds a Ph.D. in economics. (His father, former attorney general Ed Meese, served on the Iraq Study Group.) The colonel was Petraeus's XO in Bosnia in 2001. Two days after classes ended at West Point, he was on a plane to Iraq, where he stayed until school resumed. "This is my second summer vacation in Iraq," says Meese, who wants to help with reconstruction planning if the surge prevails.