The Wall Street Journal was not exactly enthusiastic about President Obama’s choice of General David Petraeus to succeed Leon Panetta as Director of the CIA. (“Obama’s Security Shuffle,”  April 29, 2011,). Arguing that the General has “earned a promotion to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the editors contend that “he may be miscast at Langley.”

 Although conventional  media-and Beltway-opinion has been largely positive about the forthcoming appointment, this writer wonders about a leader who volunteered the opinion that the burning of the Qu’ran by Florida Pastor Terry Jones would endanger US troops. Pastor Jones’ ceremonial book burning was hardly an appropriate or effective way to make the point that there is much about Islam, especially radical Islam, that constitutes the most serious current threat to Western civilization. Nevertheless, willy-nilly, the general needlessly made American behavior hostage to Islamic violence. By the same logic, the editors of Danish newspaper, Jyllens Posten, should not have published the Muhammad cartoons and should have made the Muslim street the arbiter of what could and could not be published in a Western newspaper.

Earlier in 2010, the General also opined that the Arab-Israeli conflict is one of the “root causes of instability” and “obstacles to security” in the Middle East and that it aids al-Qaida. He further argued that “serious progress in the peace process could weaken Iran’s reach, as it uses the conflict to fuel support for its terror group proxies.” It does not take much imagination to anticipate whose ox would be gored in a Petraeus-Obama “peace process.”

Undoubtedly, the Arab-Israeli conflict is one of the causes of regional instability and has been from the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Nevertheless, in view of the real sources of discontent made manifest  in the so-called “Arab spring,” the general could not have been more off target, but that hardly matters to the Obama administration which hasn’t given up its own obsession - or is it a delusion - that “solving” the conflict will bring quiet to the region. I hate to think of what will happen to the fruitful cooperation between the CIA and Mossad under General Petraeus or the intelligence briefings he is likely to offer the White House. But then again, the General may be exactly the kind of Director of Central Intelligence the president really wants, especially in a second term when he will be, if reelected, unconstrained by the imperatives of a presidential election.