Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced yesterday that President Bush has decided to nominate Gen. David Petraeus GS ’85, who has overseen U.S. troop operations in Iraq since February 2007, to command all U.S. forces in the Middle East region.
Petraeus, who earned his MPA and Ph.D. from the Wilson School, will be selected to head United States Central Command, which covers much of the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia and includes Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
"I am honored to be nominated for this position and to have an opportunity to continue to serve with America's soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, coast guardsmen and civilians," he said in a statement from Baghdad.
According to The Washington Post, Gates did not foresee any potential obstacles that would prevent the Senate from approving Petraeus' pending nomination. Gates has asked the Senate to make a decision by May 26, Memorial Day.
In his year's tenure as the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Petraeus oversaw the 30,000 troop surge while popular support for involvement in Iraq waned on the domestic front.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement today that "Our ground forces' readiness and the battles in Afghanistan and against al Qaeda in Pakistan have suffered as a result of the current costly Iraq strategy. These challenges will require fresh, independent and creative thinking and, if directed to by a new President, a commitment to implementing major changes in strategy."
In a 2006 interview with The Daily Princetonian, Richard Atkinson, a Washington Post reporter who was once an embedded journalist with the general, said that Petraeus "foreshadows the next generation of Army officers [and] the qualities they need to be successful." Atkinson added that Petraeus has "enormous influence in shaping what the Army should and will be ... in maybe 20 years."
Since taking over operations in Iraq, Petraeus has been the highest-ranking Princeton graduate in the military since the University's founding.
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