On what General Petraeus can deliver

The New Yorker, which can be good reading when Hendrik Hertzberg is on vacation, has a Talk of the Town in its July 5 issue on the change of command in Afghanistan. George Packer is articulate and (surprise!) downbeat on whether David Petraeus can actually pull the president's irons out of the fire:

"But disarray among top personnel is almost always a sign of a larger incoherence. American goals in Afghanistan remain vague, the means inadequate, the timetable foreshortened. We are nation-building without admitting it, and conducting counterinsurgency on our own clock, not the Afghans’."

Well, of course we're nation building!  Whoever said otherwise? But Mr. Packer's is a refreshingly honest appraisal of a difficult situation, and for that we can thank George W. Bush. If he were still president, Hendrik Hertzberg would never have allowed anything sensible to be written about the war he launched. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford