Is David Petraeus our next next president?

The Associated Press

Future opponents for the White House?

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Is David Petraeus our next next president?

When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress this week to report on progress in Iraq, there will be one question he'll try to avoid -- is he a candidate for president in 2012? Petraeus has offered this answer already: “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.” But the speculation won't stop. Will Petraeus be the Republican candidate in 2012?

Ben likes: Petraeus for president, ideally

Kathleen Parker/Townhall.com

If Iraqis could elect America's next president, chances are good that the next occupant of the Oval Office would be Gen. David Petraeus.
Barring that unlikely development, John McCain will do. Or so I hear from an Iraqi journalist with whom I've corresponded the past couple of years, a woman whose family was once courted by Saddam Hussein but who later became a victim of his torturers.

Mayada al-Askari is today a reporter for the Gulf News, based in Dubai but with deep Iraqi roots. Her missives, which she has agreed to let me excerpt here, haven't always been easy to read and often betrayed resentment mixed with gratitude.

Joel likes: Petraeus in '12

Spencer Ackerman/The American Prospect

For the past year, the GOP has laid the groundwork to enlist Petraeus as its standard-bearer in the fairly likely event that the party loses in November to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. You read it here first. Plant your lawn signs now. Petraeus 2012: Surging to the White House.

In the event of a Republican loss in November, the party will have to come to terms with the legacy of the war. The most politically advantageous way of doing that will be to draft a symbol of the Iraq war as it might have been: engineered and executed not by the hidebound ideologues and incompetents of the Bush administration, but by a nimble, dexterous warrior-scholar. It's true that John McCain has made the surgenik critique of the war for a long time. But it's a whole new political world when articulated by the man responsible -- in the media's imagination, at least -- with the war's belated redemption.