If Petraeus is the replacement, he will be, if nothing else, a steady hand at the helm, which may be needed more than ever in Afghanistan.

Still not clear who made the decision.  A couple say it was Gates.

Obama: Erodes trust necessary for team, responsibility to men/women fighting and our democratic system, no diversions including adherence to code of conduct, code applies to newly enlisted and general, hold ourselves accountable to standards that are the core of our democracy, disrupt ? dismantle AQ, told NS team time to come together, debate yes but won't tolerate division, meet our responsibilities to each other and troops, Amer don't flinch, we persevere, won't tolerate safe haven for terrorists, break taliban momentum build afghan capacity pressure on leadership, policy we agreed to will carry out in Af/Pak, recognizes allies, fundamental to living in peace and security in 21st century.  Grateful to Petraeus for agreeing to serve at great persoanl sacrifice, change in personnel not policy. saddened to lose service of commander come to admire, thank McChrystal

MSNBC President Relieves McChrystal

the way things are going that is possibly not too far off in our future - though the head would probably read something like this:

Goldman-Sachs CEO Sacks Joint Chiefs and Commander-in-Chief

Of course, there isn't all that much sunlight between Bush and Obama, and the foreign policies favored by both, and by all presidents the last 60 or so years...

Zbigniew Brzezinski:

For America the chief gepolitical prize is Eurasia... America's global primacy is directly dependant on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained."

"About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in it's enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources."

"America's withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival - would produce massive international instability. It would prompt global anarchy."

"The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role."

Barack Obama:

There is a longstanding bipartisan consensus in the foreign-policy establishment that the US must control every strategically valuable region of the world -- and none more so than the oil heartlands of the planet. That's been a hard-and-fast rule of the elite for some six decades now.

[snip]

"The single most important job of any president is to protect the American people," [Obama] affirmed in a major foreign-policy statement last April [2007 on the campaign trail]. But "the threats we face.... can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries.... The security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people." That's why the U.S. must be the "leader of the free world."

[snip]

That delights neoconservative guru Robert Kagan...