There's a clip at Crooks and Liars of GEN Petraeus being interviewed yesterday on The GOP Network Fox News in which Chris Wallace asks the general whether he sees the situation in Iraq being a long term commitment like Korea. Not being much of an expert in history, or military affairs, apparently young Mr Wallace seems to not understand that Korea was sort of a war, and not a guerrilla insurgency situation. Well, on the day after Father’s Day perhaps it’s easy to realize that sons often aren’t like their fathers, eh? In fact, frequently a father’s best qualities aren’t passed on with the genetic material. Looking at Chris Wallace it’s tempting to murmur, “So much for trees, and acorns.”

But GEN Petraeus’s response is quite interesting, because being in uniform and all, one might think he actually has studied this history thing that’s such a mystery down at the shallow end of the gene pool where the never-right seem to congregate.

” I think just about everybody out there recognizes that a situation like this with the many, many challenges that Iraq is contending with is not one that’s going to be resolved in a year or even two years. In fact, typically - I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or ten years.”

GEN Petraeus may have slept through some of his classes at Army Vo-Tech, or to be charitable, perhaps he forgot.

This counterinsurgency operation lasted a bit longer than 9 or 10 years.

As did this one.

And this one came in at around eight years, but it wasn’t successful either.

This one only lasted eight years, and was still unsuccessful.

This war lasted less than a year and was spectacularly unsuccessful. In fact, the insurgents fought the occupiers to a draw and gained their independence.

Round Two of it ran for just three years, with an 18 year hiatus, but filled with such division and animosity that many historians combine the two. It was sort of successful but only because the British created some monstrous methods of dealing with the insurgents and their families. The two are often thought of as one war, because Boer resentment at the influx of uitlanders upon the discovery of gold created conditions that inevitably led to the Second Boer War.

This series of counterinsurgent wars lasted for close to 300 years before they were successful, but required annihilation of the insurgents to create that success.

The colonial wars of the 17th and 18th centuries could be considered counter insurgency wars, depending on your point of view. Over a period of about 12 years the Dutch conquered the East Indies, and over about 160 years the British conquered India.

This one is just about the only counterinsurgent war that was successful, and settled in something resembling a humane fashion.