I think this is great.
Army Gen. David Petraeus, the four-star general who led troops in Iraq for the past year, will be nominated by President Bush to be the next commander of U.S. Central Command, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday.
Gates said he expected Petraeus to make the shift in late summer or early fall. […]

Here we go again.
The State Department is warning U.S. diplomats they may be forced to serve in Iraq next year and says it will soon start identifying prime candidates for jobs at the Baghdad embassy and outlying provinces, according to a cable obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.
A similar call-up notice last year caused an […]

GovExec.com is reporting that Foreign Service Officers — the folks who work for the State Department at embassies around the world — are upset over a new policy that would force them to serve in Iraq:
Several hundred U.S. diplomats vented anger and frustration Wednesday about the State Department’s decision to force foreign service officers to […]

Captain Bill Putnam, an Army Reserve intelligence officer, suggests in the Small Wars Journal that soccer may be an effective strategy for building national unity in Iraq, a prerequisite for American withdrawal:
Soccer is Iraq’s only true national sport. The passion it generates is twice that of the Super Bowl or the College Football national championship. […]

What You Missed If You Didn’t Read Today’s NYTimes

Black women in South Carolina are afraid to vote for Barack Obama because he might be assassinated.

Russian President Vladimir Putin. Oh, what a character.We have this: “We cannot build Russia’s future by tying its many millions of citizens to just one person or group of people,” he […]

I like McBlogger, but, unfortunately, it’s made itself into one of the many jackasses that have felt it necessary to comment on something it has no knowledge about.
Opinions are one thing. Actually paying close attention and then voicing an opinion is another. Stick to state politics, Mickey B.

I completely agree with Abu Muqawama:
Abu Muqawama has always been a big fan of the late French intellectual Raymond Aron. Aron, writing in his newspaper column for Le Figaro, believed it was the responsibility of the public intellectual to make a careful study of the issues at hand — economics, military strategy, etc. — before […]

Great article from The Australian about David Kilcullen, an expert in counterinsurgency and adviser to General Petraeus in Iraq:
. . . [W]hen the invasion of Iraq was being planned, Kilcullen was one of a handful of senior military advisers in the coalition of the willing to voice a dissenting view. “I was one of a […]

First off this morning, I’d like to point you to abu muqawama’s comments on a critique of Gen. Petraeus, our current commander in Iraq, by Andrew Bacevich in The New Republic.
A couple of his comments that I completely agree with (and many of which I’ve posted here about before):

[T]he big problem, as Bacevich sees […]

Great column by John Noonan at The Daily Standard:
FOR NEARLY 200 years, cadets at the United States Military Academy have been guided by the “Thayer System,” a rigid structure of unyielding regulation, austere discipline, fierce loyalty, and strong emphasis on math, science, and engineering. The method is calculated to produce Army officers of the highest […]