Petraeus has a dog of his own in this hunt

This may be a jaded view of General Saint David Petraeus, but it sounds like a pretty dead-on perspective to me. The stories about his fantastic counterinsurgency success in his part of Iraq after the invasion always had the odor of being heavily spiked by self-promotion with the aid of a gullible (and grateful) embedded press.

No one should misinterpret the original selection of Petraeus for this assignment. By selecting the one general who would place personal ambition for turning Iraq into his lab experiment on counterinsurgency at the expense of our military, Bush found the only “general on the ground” he needed to listen to, while ignoring the contrary assessments that may come from damn near everyone else in the chain of command.