Yes, after screwing up so badly at first, he made huge necessary adjustments in his approach (unlike, for example, Sec. Rumsfeld, who continued to think in an offensive-operations mindset while denying the existence of the insurgency!).
He listened to the captains and majors and sergeants who saw the problems and solutions, not the birds and stars who gauged performance by how many US taxpayer dollars they could hand out.
General Petraeus? Do you know the history of the Iraq war? Petraeus was brought in as the commanding general because he literally wrote the book on urban pacification and dealing with insurrection. The changes that were made in the Iraq strategy were his changes, as was the surge.