Right Choice, Wrong Time

According to this CNN story, it looks like Gen. George Casey is out because he actually told Dubya some stuff he didn’t want to hear. I have to admit, though, that I’m surprised by his successor.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin, among others, has communicated good things about Gen. David Petraeus (pictured), who is the new chief commander in Iraq. As Rubin noted here in the second article…

From his experience in Bosnia and elsewhere, Petraeus developed a strategy for postwar planning. In Mosul, Petraeus trained new Iraqi security forces and established stability in those first 30 days, and he used Iraqis (not big U.S. contractors) to rehab factories and infrastructure. The Petraeus model brought relative calm to Mosul while he was there.

Concerning the other personnel change, I’m not familiar with Admiral Fallon, but even CNN, which usually tows the Bushco line without question, had to point this out…

Fallon is an unusual choice to head the Central Command, which has responsibility for a land-dominated region that includes the Middle East and parts of Africa.

Until now, the post has always gone to an Army or Marine general, just as the ocean-dominated Pacific Command usually goes to a Navy admiral. But because of his current service in the war Fallon does have the advantage of representing a clean slate in regard to the current Iraq policy.

“Representing a clean slate,” huh? So he was named for the sake of political expediency?

Great.

(And by the way, I don’t care about Negroponte, since he’s just picking up where he left off under Reagan as far as I’m concerned; in a perverse way, it’s kind of funny how death squads show up in Iraq once he enters the picture much like they did in Honduras in the ‘80s.)

So it looks like “The Decider” will have two new scapegoats to blame when his “new way forward” leads to nowhere.