Looking for generals in all the wrong places

Looks like Obama listened to the wrong generals on Afghanistan. Or, did he deliberately refuse to listen to the "right" ones because his mind was already made up?

Bob Woodward's book consistently shows three officers - retired Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, retired Gen. James L. Jones and Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute - all cautioned him about the "surge" advocated by Gen. David Petraeus. None more strongly than Lute, a holdover from the Bush Administration.

That, in turn led to spats with Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Actually, it looks like he didn't listen to anybody, too much, other than accepting Petraeus' 30,000 minimum as his own and apparently committing in advance to a 40,000 maximum.

Despite the critiques from Lute, Jones and Eikenberry, the only options that were seriously considered in the White House involved 30,000 to 40,000 more troops. ...

In early November 2009, Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, drafted a cable that was sharply critical of the military's counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, saying it was likely to both "increase Afghan dependency" on the United States and force the U.S. government to incur "vastly increased costs." ...

The three generals' efforts, however, seem to have had only a modest influence on the final war strategy - in part because top Pentagon officials such as Mullen, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates presented a united front in opposition to deploying any fewer than 30,000 additional troops.

So, if this is all true, why did Obama treat us to his drawn-out Hamlet-like handwringing?

You know the answer.

It was to try to convince more liberal parts of his base that he was, actually, handwringing. Nice try, but a fail.