David Petraeus

Gen. David H. Petraeus had just assumed his new role as U.S. Central Command chief in 2009 when he began introducing his staff to a young Harvard University researcher who was writing his biography. The woman, Paula Broadwell, then 37, had never written a book and had almost no journalistic experience. But that wasn't the only thing about her that made the general's aides nervous. Petraeus — already the most acclaimed U.S. military commander in recent decades — had until then been extraordinarily careful...

O n Syria, President Obama has sometimes seemed isolated within his own administration. As the atrocities have escalated — from the shelling of neighborhoods to airstrikes on bread lines to the use of Scud missiles against civilians to the likely incremental introduction of chemical weapons — the Assad regime's strategy has become alarmingly clear. Unable to retake rebel-held areas, it seeks to depopulate them, producing mass casualties, refugee flows and sectarian conflict . During the past two years, it has been reported that many of...

ZAKARIA: In 2003, after the fall of Baghdad, you were placed in northern Iraq, in Mosul, commanding the 101st Airborne Division. And you decided that you needed to fight the war in a different way . PETRAEUS: It was very clear early on that we, the military, were going to have to do the nation building. People occasionally ask, "What were the big decisions you made in Iraq?" The biggest decision I made early on in Iraq that I announced--to a little bit of stunned silence from the commanders--was that we [were]

Among the stranger facts about Paul Kevin Curtis , the guy charged with sending ricin-laced letters to President Obama and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), is that he was an Elvis Presley impersonator . Leaving aside for the moment the considerable worry the case has caused in official Washington, it's also creating heartburn amid an unlikely circle: the small community of Elvis impersonators around the globe. Jesse Aron , an Elvis impersonator and the president of the Elvis Entertainers Network, a...

CIA Director David H. Petraeus resigned Friday and admitted to having an extramarital affair, bringing a shocking end to his brief tenure at the spy agency and highly decorated national security career. The affair came to light as part of an FBI investigation into a potential security breach involving Petraeus's e-mails, according to federal law enforcement officials and a former senior intelligence official. The investigation uncovered e-mails describing an affair between Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, a former military officer and...

Regarding Michael Gerson's Nov. 12 op-ed column, " An honorable man's flaw ": The reason why David Petraeus had to give up his office is not that he did not meet "expectation[s] of personal behavior"; rather, it is that Petraeus made himself subject to the possibility of blackmail while the relationship was secret. It is not difficult to imagine a foreign intelligence service seeking to exploit such information. It is this potential, to be controlled by foreign influences, that constitutes a serious...

At the start of the year, retired Gen. David H. Petraeus was flying high. He was the director of the CIA and was often mentioned as a prospective presidential candidate. He was the most recognized and heralded general of his generation, the subject of many adoring news stories and books. He had been the hero of the Iraq war, turning around an apparent disaster with the troop surge. And in 2010, he was called in to take over the Afghan war after Gen. Stanley McChrystal's dismissal.

"It's ‘open the envelope time,' " Gen. David Petraeus told his security team as his SUV approached the White House on June 21, 2011, for his final meeting with President Obama on the drawdown of forces from Afghanistan. Petraeus had returned to Washington from his command in Kabul for consultations with Obama on the drawdown, and for a Senate committee hearing on his nomination to become the next director of the CIA. On the way from the Pentagon, retired Army general Jack Keane, a mentor and former vice...

Who knew that the lives of some of the country's top generals resembled an episode of "Jersey Shore"? First came retired Gen. David Petraeus, who stepped aside as CIA director on Nov. 9 after acknowledging an extramarital affair with a woman named Paula Broadwell . That little liaison dangereuse "won" Petraeus the worst week in Washington a week ago . Little did we know that it was only the first chapter of an increasingly tawdry novel....

Popular generals in unpopular wars attract attention. Gen. David Petraeus has already inspired two biographical accounts of his successful leadership of the Bush troop surge in Iraq. Paula Broadwell and her collaborator, Washington Post metro editor Vernon Loeb, employ a similar format to examine his implementation of the Obama surge in Afghanistan. Embedded in Petraeus's Kabul headquarters, Broadwell was uniquely positioned to describe its byzantine political and...

Gen. David Petraeus, who retired from the Army in 2011 after commanding U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, was director of the CIA from September 2011 to November 2012. Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and most recently the author of " Healing the Wounded Giant ," on U.S. defense spending. As politicians in Washington focus on reining in America's worrisome deficit, they tend to have attitudes of doom and gloom. They convey fears of shortchanging future generations, overtaxing workers,...

LOS ANGELES — In his first public speech since resigning as head of the CIA, David Petraeus apologized for the extramarital affair that "caused such pain for my family, friends and supporters. " The hero of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars struck a somber, apologetic tone as he spoke to about 600 people, including his wife and many uniformed and decorated veterans, at the University of Southern California's annual ROTC dinner on Tuesday night. "I know...

I t took only a few years in the Senate woodshed, and now the political rehabilitation of Sen. David Vitter looks complete . Our colleague Paul Kane on Tuesday had Vitter back in the good graces of voters and colleagues alike. Who can forget how his number showed up in the notorious black book of the "D.C. Madam," causing the Louisiana Republican to admit before the cameras a "very serious sin"? Apparently, quite a few folks. But the senator's reversal of fortune isn't unique.

At the start of the year, retired Gen. David H. Petraeus was flying high. He was the director of the CIA and was often mentioned as a prospective presidential candidate. He was the most recognized and heralded general of his generation, the subject of many adoring news stories and books. He had been the hero of the Iraq war, turning around an apparent disaster with the troop surge. And in 2010, he was called in to take over the Afghan war after Gen. Stanley McChrystal's dismissal.

We've known that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson has been planning her exit from the Cabinet, and now we hear she's exploring that well-worn path from government-officialdom to academia. Jackson is talking to some university officials, we're told, and her name is among those being floated as possible candidates for the presidency of Princeton, the institution where she got a graduate engineering degree. University President Shirley Tilghman (Princeton's first female chief)

On April 16, 2011, Fox News contributor Kathleen T. McFarland met with Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was then head of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Below is an edited transcript of a portion of the conversation in which the two discuss Petraeus's future, his views of the news media and his reaction to the suggestion by Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes that he run for president. (Full story: Fox News chief's failed attempt to enlist Petraeus as presidential candidate)

This two-day series was adapted from "The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008" (Penguin Press), by Thomas E. Ricks. The book is based primarily on interviews with Gen. David H. Petraeus, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, and scores of other members of the U.S. military in Washington and Iraq.

As events have unfolded in what shall ever be known as " The Petraeus Affair ," one cannot escape noticing that the women in this sordid saga have been handed the short end of the shtick, as though the men are mere victims of ambitious, hormonally driven vixens. There's the so-called "socialite" in Tampa, Jill Kelley , who courted generals and exchanged at least hundreds of e-mails with our lead commander in Afghanistan, John Allen . And there's the biographer with toned arms, Paula Broadwell , who wore tight jeans and...

For nearly a decade I have had the privilege of teaching veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, though they have taught me more. Most of them were Army captains and majors who had done three or four tours of duty. And here's the most remarkable thing: Not one of these men and women complained about what we asked of them. They have, however, occasionally objected to the shameful fact that after the first few years of hostilities, these became largely invisible conflicts. In the final stages of the Iraq war and for a long...