an interesting article on the 'new team'....
WP: Petraeus' team of warrior-PhDs - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.comGen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals -- including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders -- in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.Army officers tend to refer to the group as "Petraeus guys." They are smart colonels who have been noticed by Petraeus, and who make up one of the most selective clubs in the world: military officers with doctorates from top-flight universities and combat experience in Iraq.
Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents, who have criticized the way the service has operated there the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way.
these seem like dedicated and able individuals, but as put forth by others in the article, IMO it's too late. 4 years of incompetence and arrogance have brought us to this point, and the american public doesn't have the patience to wait another four.
i don't see how petraeus is going to turn everything around in iraq before the summer of next year...pres. candidates will be falling all over themselves to either distance themselves from the president and his failed war, or promising to get the troops out the earliest possible date.
even patraeus and his group must know it's over.