In fairness to Rodion, our President did say that if his party had not been clobbered in the '06 elections, he would not have asked Rumsfeld to resign. So in a sort of extremely indirect way, the course of the war was influenced more by the voters than ... oh, nevermind. It's not even worth trying to torture logic that far.

Let's just agree that Rumsfeld was not the man for the job, and it looks as though Petraeus is.