The new U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is signalling a new approach to the conflict in Iraq by drafting a team of intellectual subject-matter experts to lead his efforts at “winning” the war. According to the Washington Post, Petraeus has solicited the help of a select group of military commanders with Ph.D’s in subjects like Islamic Anthropology, Economics, and War History.

As the U.S.-designed campaign to bring security to Baghdad unfolds, Petraeus’s chief economic adviser, Col. Michael J. Meese, will coordinate security and reconstruction efforts, trying to ensure that “build” follows the “clear” and “hold” phases of action. Meese also holds a PhD from Princeton, where he studied how the Army historically handled budget cuts. He is the son of former attorney general Edwin Meese III, who was a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, whose December critique helped push the Bush administration to shift its approach in Baghdad.

Petraeus, who along with the group’s members declined to be interviewed for this article, has chosen as his chief adviser on counterinsurgency operations an outspoken officer in the Australian Army. Lt. Col. David Kilcullen holds a PhD in anthropology, for which he studied Islamic extremism in Indonesia.

While the solicitation of more brain power in fighting the war is not new to U.S. millitary strategies, it is something that we have not witnessed in this war. I applaued the General for taking a new approach in coaxing some type of settlement to the conflict, but it all begs some probing questions with one common answer:

Why have we not witnessed this in Iraq before now? If this brain power existed in the military at the start of the conflict why did the Bush administration fail to utilize them from the beginning? Why were political operatives used to build a pseudo-police force, a pathetic health care system, and left to exert little in the way of economic conditioning for Iraq? The answer is clear — the Bush administration, much like the Nixon administration, used its position and the war to reward those that had done so much to get Bush to the White House, ignoring the facts and rejecting logical approaches to securing Iraq from the start.

Petraeus may be the right man for the job, but unfortunately the job has morphed from a winnable war in 2003 to a complete disaster today, and despite his best efforts this strategy will have little to no effect on the overall outcome of this conflict. It is simply too little much too late.