Rumsfeld seemed great for a few years, but clearly didn't do a good job with Iraq. We had a masterful plan for defeating the Iraqi army and taking Baghdad, but didn't have solid planing in place for what to do afterward.
I don't recall the Iraq study group offering up a winning strategy on Iraq either. Wasn't Petraeus responsible for the strategy of "The Surge"?
I'm not so sure I would refer to 0bama, Hillary, Richard Holbrooke, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the rest of the liberals at the State Department as "Realists" when it comes to foreign policy. Was that sarcasm?
Holbrooke is in that group that is called National Security Democrats aka liberal interventionists aka liberal hawks. Others is this group are Ike Skelton, Jane Harmon, and Diane Feinstein. The DUers call them leftwing neocons. Definately different from the liberal surrender monkeys.
As for Petraeus, he is important, but you need to look at his COIN advisor, John Nagl. Nagl was West Point and a Rhodes Scholar, he rewrote the COIN manual, that is being used in Afghan. He became president of the think tank, Center for a New American Security(CNAS) last Jan.
McCrystal is important, but you need to look at his COIN advisor, Andrew Exum, who is now a Senior Fellow at CNAS.
There were about a dozen individuals at CNAS who went to work for Obama last Jan, all in policy positions, including Michele Flournoy, who became Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the number 3 job at DoD. This is the same job that Douglas Feith had under GW Bush.
While the conversation between Obama and his senior advisors is about 20, 30, or 40 thousand troops, those working out side of scrutiny are talking about a ramp or ramp up in Afghan. How many boots on the ground in 2015 or 2017.
As for Hillary, this is just a temporary job that will give her some foreign policy experience so that she can join the William J Clinton Foundation as a full partner, so that they can be crowned King and Queen of the World by the UN.
As for Obama, because of the part that the republican realists play in his election and the influence they have had on his policies, plus the fact that Obama had brought in many interventionists, the political classifiers call him a Realist Interventionist. But, he doesn't want to get caught in the same trap that caught Bush in Iraq. And Rahm doesn't want him to get caught either.