We wish this fellow the best, but this description of David Petraeus in the WaPo as an “intellectual” is a little off-putting:

Long recognized as one of the Army’s premier intellectuals, with a PhD from Princeton to complement his West Point education, Petraeus, 54, will inherit one of the toughest assignments handed any senior officer since the Vietnam War…Petraeus, if controversial among some peers who deem him arrogant or excessively ambitious, is seen by many others as perhaps the last, best hope…

Unaccustomed to failure, he is, in the words of one former aide, “the most competitive man on the planet.”…Accolades and achievements followed as he moved from post to post. Petraeus received all three prizes awarded in his class at Ranger School, perhaps the Army’s toughest physical and psychological challenge, and he later won the George C. Marshall award as the top graduate in the Army Command and General Staff College class of 1983…Petraeus alternated command and staff assignments with duty as an aide to several of the Army’s most prominent four-star generals, a pattern that caused one envious peer to call him a “professional son.”…

His intensity, cutting intellect and competitiveness have rubbed some officers the wrong way. Muttered jibes about “King David” have been heard around his command post. He remains obsessive about what he calls “the P.T. culture” — physical training — and has been known to challenge soldiers half his age to various athletic competitions. “If anyone beats him in the shorter runs, four miles or so, he takes them out for 10 miles and smokes them,” a staff officer observed several years ago.

And this from an interview (via HH):

What’s the outlook for the Iraqi national government. You know, I don’t have any doubt, and I think we have shown, and the Iraqis have shown, that they can train battalions, brigades, and divisions, they can train national police, which is more challenging, but that’s all doable. The question is:How long will it take the national unity government to truly foster a sense of national unity and to give the Iraqi security force members a sense that they are fighting for Iraq, for their Iraq rather than drifting off to militias or into sectarian groups or whatever it is.

We wish him the best and hope that he is less PC and more innovative than his predecessors.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 8:07 am and is filed under General, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.