Advice of Acting Generals in Iraq

The advice of acting generals in Iraq, are often biased on several different factors.
1) They report to the Command In Chief of the Armed Forces, the President of the United States, and are strongly pressured to say what the Presidents wants them to say. Their advice, may or may not change, depending on who their boss, the current President is. Think about it, how often do you want to publicly say something publicly that is against your boss and undermines what he says?
2) Defense Contractors often slip money to military personnel to push things their way. I wouldn't be surprised if they slipped some money in an offshore unnamed bank account for Gen. Petraeus. There is no actual proof of this, just that this is the common way of doing business in Washington.

As a civilian, I worked under a retired two-star General for a Defense Contractor. This guy took credit for other people's work, and quick to blame others when things go wrong. He was totally self-serving. All the workers and managers around me was saying this. I was a little naive at the time and asked, "How did he get to be a two-star General, if he was such a user?" The response was, "How do you think?" And the retired Lieutenant Colonel acted more like a Sales Manager than anything else in the way he conducted himself. I think this is just the norm.

Of course, there are exceptions like Gen. Colin Powell, who are highly ethical and care about his troops and doing the right thing. A number of the other retired Generals, I think are good men, who spoke against the way Donald Rumsfeld was handling the war. There are good men in there, it's just they are the exceptions.