Dexter Filkins: How General Petraeus Turned the Tide in Iraq : The New Yorker

Dexter Filkins: How General Petraeus Turned the Tide in Iraq : The New Yorker: How the Army got to such a point is the subject of Thomas Ricks’s “The Generals,’’ a series of vivid biographical sketches of American commanders from the Second World War to Afghanistan. In Ricks’s view, their quality, with a few exceptions, has steadily declined. His poster boy for the terrible early period of the Iraq war is Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, whom he accurately portrays as a decent man but an incompetent commander