Third Way Dispatch - The Peter Pandemic Takes Its Toll: HR McMaster is Passed Over by Matt Bennett.

... But the fact that a bunch of incompetent imbeciles are running our country is old news. Now we find that the Bush Administration has brought us the corollary to the Peter Principle: genuinely gifted and brilliant public servants who are kept far below the level to which they should ascend.

There are, no doubt, scores of such talents in the federal bureaucracy, held down from their rightful rise by political calculation, petulance or oversight. But one recent and egregious example is the Pentagon’s failure to promote (for a second time) Army Colonel HR McMaster.

Now you may be thinking, wasn’t it H.R. McMaster that led the pacification of Tal Afar, an operation so successful that Bush devoted an entire speech to it just last year? Didn’t I read about McMaster’s brilliant strategy in a long New Yorker piece about him? Wasn’t it McMaster who won a Silver Star in the Gulf War, leading troops so bravely and well that Tom Clancy wrote it up? And surely it was McMaster who’s PhD dissertation became a hugely influential book, Dereliction of Duty, that the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs made required reading for senior military types?

Well brace yourself – the answer to all of your questions is yes. McMaster is a brilliant tactician, a decorated hero, a soldier’s soldier, and a master of the very kind of war we’re fighting in Iraq – the counterinsurgency. In fact, he’s back in Iraq now, helping soon-to-be-fall-guy David Petraeus try to fend off further disaster. But somehow McMaster’s “superiors” – the suits at the Pentagon who helped bring us the Fiasco that McMaster is attempting to clean up – have decided that he isn’t flag officer material...
It's a damn, damn shame.