Washington, DC
Monday, July 9th

Today we were busy from tap to buzzer. In the morning the case study was, The Accidental Statesman: General Petraeus and the City of Mosul, Iraq. Eve though I was not teaching this one I sat in on the classes. The case centers on 101st Cavalry led by Gen. Petraeus in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. At 58 pages it is the longest case study but I think it is by far the most interesting. The case centers on how the mission of the 101st Cav changes very quickly from that of fighting to that of state building.

Petraeus and his troops have to rebuild and in most cases, build from scratch, the infrastructure in Mosul. He had to balance the ethnic and religious tension in the area. That is quite difficult considering there are ethnic Kurds (two factions), Sunnis, and Arab Shiites. The case details the painstaking manner that Patraeus and his staff design and enact structures that enable the different groups mentioned above by into the rebuilding of Iraq. Patraeus’ people are quite impressive at doing tasks that they were NEVER trained to do. The incident that sticks out in my mind is in the inventing of an election process they were translating 7th grade civic textbooks into Arabic to try some sort of democracy education. In order to have balance among groups competing for power in the new Iraq Patraeus named the process (s) election instead of a pure election. Things ran quite smoothly until the de-baathification under Paul Bremer’s directives. I could go on for a long time; it’s a long case study. Gen. Patraeus is now the Commander of the Multi-National Force (MFN-1). Check out his biography and this article in Newsweek about him and is plans. I think that the plans in Iraq were lost early but the only thread of chance has is this guy. I just hope that the administration lets him cal the plays. When they, Rumsfeld and others, got in he and his troop’s way in Mosul things fell apart pretty quickly.

General Patraeus

The next speaker was David Aufhauser, who currently is the General Counsel for Global and American Affairs at UBS but was the general counsel for the Department of the Treasury. His topic was on fighting the financing of terror. He spoke at length about the role finance plays in terrorism. The talk was extremely informative. He and the students willingly short changed their lunch time for extra Q and A. On a side note the book Aufhauser told them all they must read to begin to understand the situation in the Middle East is a book I use a great deal in my world history class, Islam, A Short History by Karen Armstrong. That makes me feel good about my research and materials for my class. I have also included a link from testimony that Aufhauser gave at a Capital Hill Middle East Policy Council.

The students heard from Stuart Holliday, Ambassador and Alternate United States Representative in the United Nations for Special Political Affairs. In plain English, he is like the US Ambassador to the United Nations. I did not hear the talk. I took off some time to get some coffee and do some reading, which morphed into a long power nap. The rest of the day was relatively uneventful.

In the evening the students heard from Rob Knauer, an Albans alum, and Marine Corp Infantry Captain who served three tours in various parts of Iraq. The students loved his talk and they were obviously quite informed after the previous two days curriculum. Capt. Knauer was a last minute addition; it is amazing how many speakers we get. I learned more about Iraq and terrorism in the last three weeks than I did the last three years, and I read a lot to try and keep up.

Marine Capt. Rob Knauer