Dasvedanya, Don't Get Any On Ya for Petraeus

General Petraeus is heading out of Iraq to head up CENTCOM, and he has a farewell message to the troops which Miserable Donuts has on their website. I served under him for 12 of the 19 months he was there, and it was interesting time to be there. The surge was an incredibly controversial executive order, and it was questionable as to whether counter-insurgency tactics could reap benefits in a country that had been so decimated by decades under Ba'ath rule and several years of active combat. Only history can judge whether or not it was the right method to stabilize the region, but just abandoning Iraq in 2007 might have led to unprecedented genocide due to competing ethnosectarian rivals. The level of violence in Iraq has already been at an egregious level the last 5 years, but it's heartening to know that under the military leadership of Petraeus, much of the bloodhshed was dampened due to a variety of new tactics implemented country-wide. We all follow orders to differing degrees in the military, even those at the highest levels of the food chain, and you can only hope the guys above you know what the fuck they are doing. I'm sure glad he did.