Maybe Petraeus really believes he's "apolitical." We don't.

Is it unseemly for a general to entangle himself in national politics?  Many think so and I'm one of them.  For General Petraeus, who can't have missed the controversy about entering into and then prolonging the Iraq war, to openly embrace a very political administration's very political war is to compromise both his effectiveness and his credibility. No two ways about it.  His Washington Post op-ed was an opener to a situation in which he has allowed himself to be compromised daily over a period of three years even as there are now questions popping up about a far-reaching corruption scandal touching oversight of contractors during his earlier command in Iraq.

A McClatchy reporter interviewed Petraeus at some length yesterday in his hotel room in Washington. 

The general expressed discomfort with his growing public persona and with the fact that some now see him as a political figure who's become the face of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

"I am not entirely comfortable, candidly, with sort of being in this particular situation," Petraeus said. "I've actually tried to stay somewhat apolitical. ...I guess it's sort of evitable to end up in this position."

He said he's tried to be honest about what he believes the situation to be in Iraq, and while some have doubted his claims that violence has dropped, he said he only wanted to tell the public what the surge forces were doing.

"I have honestly tried to just lay out the situation and to explain where we were in December 2006, what led to the surge, what we've done with the additional soldiers, where we have made progress, where we haven't made progress, where we have had setbacks as well as progress...and then how we hope to take this forward," he said.

"We are not trying to mislead, I assure you that."

But one only has to read his op-ed to draw the conclusion that either he was trying to mislead or that he suffers from really poor military (and political!) judgment.  Or damaging naivete.

And look at what he now admits has been a ... has been misleading.

Petraeus also acknowledged that his claim that Baghdad's security forces have 445,000 people on the payroll may have exaggerated the size of the force.

"Thousands are sitting in the ministries themselves. They are not cops on the beat," he said. "Some are phantom, without question. And we're trying to help them identify those. Some are casualties, because they keep those on the payrolls because it's difficult. Some are retirees, and the administrative process of getting people only on retirees payrolls (is) very challenging.

Why then did you claim those numbers, General?