Head of US Central Command Out After a Year

The New York Times reports that Admiral William Fallon, the US military commander in charge of US Central Command, an area including much of the Middle East, Central Asia, and eastern Africa, has resigned after only a year on the job. The great part is that the piece in the NYT suggests that it is because of comments made by Fallon to al-Jazeera which only became a problem months later when they appeared in Esquire. Apparently the Bush Administration doesn't monitor what its appointees say to al-Jazeera:

Officials said the last straw, however, came in an article in Esquire magazine by Thomas P. M. Barnett, a respected military analyst, that profiled Admiral Fallon under the headline, “The Man Between War and Peace.” The article highlighted comments Admiral Fallon made to the Arab television station al-Jazeera last fall, in which he said that a “constant drumbeat of conflict” from Washington that was directed at Iran and Iraq was “not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions.”