So Gen. Petraeus is in town to give some briefings to think tanks and conferences about what his priorities for Central Command will be in the coming year. He’ll be at the Kagans’ Institute for the Study of War tomorrow morning — I’ll be checking that out, mostly to see if the coffee there is brewed with cordite — but today he was at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. And he decided to take a few good-natured shots, according to the transcript.

GEN. PETRAEUS: Thank you. Well, it’s good to be with you and you know you have a couple of choices when you’re in this position and of course we’ve got a whole staff of PowerPoint rangers out there that are always eager to provide the latest update. Actually so Tony Cordesman can take them then by the way and repackage them and send them out, which we are happy to have happen. (Laughter.)

Ohhhhhhhhhh! Super-ugly. But then of course came this:

No, truly, I mean actually I think Tony will be the first to admit that there has been no more cooperative provider of slides, metrics data and everything else to him since I don’t know when we started that, probably when I was a MNSTC-I commander and it’s quite a good partnership.

And in return, in truth, Tony has been a very good conscience for us at various times and one reason we do these kinds of events is because it does – it challenges us. It sharpens our thinking. It forces me to come to grips with issues and so forth…