There was another famous American general, Gen George Patton, who spoke French fluently and when he was put in charge of some areas of France to administrate near the end of the war and after immediately complained that he needed to bring the Nazi trained bureacrats back in because the French seemed incapable of picking up a brick off the street. It wasn't the fact that Sen Kerry spoke French that bothered people it was the idea that speaking French made him something special as opposed to being merely fluent in Spanish, as is Pres. Bush, which a heck of a lot more of our neighbors speak than French.

I'll have to backtrack a bit because I also couldn't find his comment on the surge except the had had argued that troops should have been sent to Afghanistan instead and that the surge hadn't worked as of late 2007 and early 2008.

I'll remain firm on my postition that he was passed over, just as Wesley Clark was and that there already was a Marine as Chairman, Peter Pace, who though not renominated is still on the JCS. And once the surge seemed to working then it was obvious that Jones, who had held no actual command for years, was in Kurdish Iraq for only a few months after the 1st Gulf war and has had no other command even remotely connected to the Middle East which would seem a requirement for CENTCOM. He was not going to get the CENTCOM position which went to Gen. Petraus this year and was not offered to Gen Jones in either 2001 at any time after as Rumsfeld and Gates were happy with Adm. Fallon even though a magazine article about him left quite a few politicians and generals unhappy.

But the main point is that the appointment to head up NATO is the last stop of a well-connected and generally well-accomplished military career. By rights the US doesn't have enough troops in Europe to justify its position as Supreme Commander. But the treaty recognizes that this total is based on troops assigned to Europe and not where they are deployed. In other words on paper the US may have 200,000 troops stationed in Europe but due to deployments may actually only have 75,000 in Europe. Slightly over on division. Thus this command is not a step up as much as it is a step out but without the gold watch. But the appointment to CENTCOM is that final step before either retirement or the JCS usually the latter and Gen. Jones knew when he headed off to Europe and then was passed over his career was at its apex and would go no higher.

I'm not sure how one can claim Raytheon is outperforming the market when its decline is virtually the same throughout the sector. I'd hate to have to explain to my stockholders that they were lucky that they could have lost more and then have to face a hostile Democratic congress ready to cut the procurement budget. Though the recent announcement that Raytheon had been credited with the installation and testing of all required electronics systems in the first of the new Zumwalt class destroyers. the ones with all the Star Trek weapons and detection system. That could help Raytheon immensely. But they will have a way to go before the restore the lost capitalization and loss of capital they have suffered.

I'm not to sure if you have thought through your comment concerning catching the leadership of the Taliban or al Qaeda as that would have entailed a ground invasion of Pakistan. The tactics that worked in Afghanistan of using the Northern Alliance would have been a miserable failure in the much better organized, equipped and trained Pakistani military.

In spite of the constant repetition of an unsourced claim that Gen Shinseki was removed from command he retired in June of 2003 on exactly the same date he had planned and his service record suggested as early as 1996. Pres. Bush spoke at Shinseki's retirement and much later it came out that Sec. Rumsfeld used him as a consultant when problems with the Stryker Brigades(the Strykers didn't fit in the Globemaster as originally called for). Shinseki recommended that no more C17 IIIs be built and that production be sped up on the C17B which can carry the Stryker as well as the Bradley. Some exile.

There were obviously quite a few reasons but it is plain that the surge worked as it was designed. Read Petraeus's Counter-Insurgency manual which outlined several steps to pacify Iraq. Clear and hold, use of overwhelming force and multipliers of force, enhanced training of the Iraqis and bribes. What is terribly surprising or even smacks of the surge somehow being tainted because the US used every tool available. One of the bonuses is that most of Sadr Brigades, while Sadr is still in Iran "studying to be an ayatollah, were being degraded in each encounter with first the US forces, then the Iraqi army and even now by the national police. That's like arguing that Stalin allowed Poland to be pacified because he withdrew his forces from combat. I guess that is a new way of describing a rout.

I would not recommend that Europeans assume that geography or infrastructure is on their side. That was a tactic that the Phillipines tried and failed spectacularly with in Subic Bay as well as the Vietnamese when they turned over an US navy base to the Russians. But who already allowed, very quietly, for the US Navy and the NSA to set up small bases, survey Cam Rahn Bay and negotiate for the return of the US Navy. Closing the US naval base in Italy would mean some initial difficulty but the possibility of naval bases in Morocco or defintely in Albania. As well as the smaller bases already in Bulgaria and Macedonia. Plus it might be wise to consider that within a year of removing Saddam from power that Balad in Kurdistan hosted one of the biggest and busiest military air bases in the world with two runways of over 11,000 feet essentially built from scratch.

But the fact remains that the second beating heart of the Free World is Europe and the US and Janus-faced European politicians are no more anxious for the US to leave then they are to face the consequences. The fact is that no US president, even if in so doing cause rversals elsewhere in the world, is going to abandon Europe. And the prospect of the 10th Division and the 24th MEU running around the German countryside in desert camo is more likely than NATO breaking up.