Nancy Youssef sends this on today's Central Command announcement:

The naming of Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top Iraqi commander, to head U.S. Central Command and Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, Petraeus' deputy, to become the new Iraq commander suggests that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants the counterinsurgency strategy the two men have championed to define U.S. relations in the region that Central Command oversees. That includes, among other nations, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq.

The appointments come at a precarious time, both in Iraq and the region. Petraeus’ surge strategy, which led to a significant drop in violence, has been in peril in parts of Baghdad after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki launched an offensive in Basra last month.

But Iran may be the bigger issue. During his congressional testimony earlier this month, Petraeus said Iran has been aggravating violence in Iraq, but stopped short of calling for U.S. military action against Iraq's eastern neighbor.

Petraeus' comments, however, were more hawkish than those of his predecessor, Adm. William “Fox” Fallon, who abruptly retired last month after Esquire published a story in which Fallon said he was standing in the way of a tougher policy toward Iran. Gates and Fallon both denied there was a rift, but Fallon said that the perception of one forced him to leave.

The appointment of Odierno as Iraq commander marks something of a redemption. He'd previously been criticized for having a ham-handed "kinetic" approach to warfare that lacked the subtlety counterinsurgency requires. His aggressive tactics against the insurgency in northern Iraq during his previous stint there are often blamed for inflaming tensions, rather than tamping them down.

But in his announcement, Gates said that Odierno had built strong relationships with the Iraqi leadership as Petraeus's No. 2 in Iraq.

Until Fallon’s retirement, Odierno was slated to be the Army’s vice chief of staff. Now that post will go to Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who during his service in Iraq was among the first commanders to recognize that U.S. killings of innocent Iraqis had helped fuel the insurgency. "I would argue in many instances we are our own worst enemy," he told me in June, 2006.