Give Petraeus a Chance

Victor Davis Hanson says we should give Petraeus a chance. An excerpt:

Only when Sherman cut loose from his supply lines and surrounded Atlanta (taken on September 2, 1864), along with Phil Sheridan's progress in Virginia (September - October), was Lincoln's political agenda of emancipation and reunification of the United States back on track. In World War I, the British government was tottering until General Haig withstood the German spring offensive of 1918 and gave the necessary respite for the surge of American troops to allow the allies to go back on the offensive and give the politicians the credibility to demand a German surrender.

After the fall of France, Dunkirk, losses in the Atlantic, Greece, Singapore, and Tobruk, Churchill's soaring rhetoric was wearing thin and had earned him a motion introduced calling for censure; only the subsequent successes in North Africa, in the Atlantic, and in the air above Germany gave him renewed stature to press the case for absolute resistance to Hitler. General Ridgeway did the same in Korea, mostly through personal magnetism and insistence that his demoralized subordinates cease their defeatism and go back on the offensive. Had he failed, Truman would not have the capital to save the south. Abrams, and the so-called "Christmas bombing," almost pulled off the same in Vietnam.