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Something about a soldier
The real Petraeus scandal
Robert Zaller
Of all the frustrations of the Obama administration's first four years, perhaps nothing can match the absence of a sex scandal. Even making Hillary Clinton Secretary of State didn't help.
Now, however, America's vaunted military has come to the rescue. The retired four-star General David Petraeus, lately tasked with reforming the CIA, turns out to have been even working harder in the sack with his biographer— shades of John Edwards and Rielle Hunter.
Meanwhile, John Allen, Petraeus's four-star successor on the front lines of the Afghan war— that is, Tampa, Florida— has apparently found sufficient time between battles to generate more than 20,000 pages of e-mail mash notes with another belle, herself the object of hate mail from Petraeus's lady love.
Both men, it seems, also had enough leisure time to intervene in a custody battle on behalf of the twin sister of the second lady, while the latter pair have regularly crashed social functions at the White House. You can't make this stuff up, except in script rejects for "Dallas."
Remember Stormin' Norman?
On the back burner sits General Jeffrey Sinclair, accused of molesting and/or sodomizing five women, mostly his subordinates. On other burners we find the junkets of General William Ward, head of America's "Africa Command," and the navy commander who showed up with a drunken crew at a Russian port. Apparently a $700 billion annual budget can buy you plenty of good times, even if it can't buy you a successful war.
Which brings me to a more serious problem. We Americans may not be good at winning wars, but we still lionize our military. Remember when Norman Schwarzkopf was all the rage? Tommy Franks? Colin Powell was tipped for president on the basis of that turkey shoot in Desert Storm; even his gulling by W. into making the nonexistent case for Saddam Hussein's missile sites in front of a world audience hardly dimmed his luster.
Obama, who opposed the Iraq war before he got stuck with it, welcomed Powell's imprimatur on his run for the White House in 2008. Once you've got those four stars on your shoulder, it's hard to knock 'em off.
After Vietnam
Maybe it all goes back to George Washington, a lousy general— only his British opponents were worse— but a military hero, who planted the fatal seed of war-worship in our national culture.
Military hero worship suffered a serious glitch in Vietnam, whose field marshal, William Westmoreland, faded away in disgrace after monumental defeat. The military and its political supporters dealt with this problem by fighting only wars we were guaranteed to win through the application of overwhelming force against hopelessly inferior opponents. Desert Storm— the invasion of Iraq in 1991— was the prototype of such wars, and Operation Enduring Freedom—the war fought 12 years later to topple Saddam—was supposed to be a similar cakewalk. It didn't work out that way, though.
It was at this point that David Petraeus rode to the rescue. Petraeus made his reputation with the Surge, a mopping-up operation based on enlisting Sunnis beset by Al Qaeda, Saddam loyalists, and a newly-empowered Shi'ite majority bent on vengeance for centuries of Sunni domination. The calculation of this "counterinsurgency" strategy was cynical: By arming the Sunnis, we helped set the stage for future civil war in Iraq while opening an exit for ourselves from an enterprise that had spun hopelessly out of control.
Our friends, the Afghans
Petraeus sold the same strategy to Obama for America's other failed war in Afghanistan. Fully half of our troop losses in Afghanistan have come as a result of the second Surge. In gratitude for our help, the Afghans we've trained and armed have turned their weapons on us, while Afghan warlords prepare for the next round of battle against the Taliban foes we've failed to vanquish, plus of course each other.
Petraeus was treated with kid gloves in his recent closed-door testimony to Congress on the Benghazi consulate fiasco, and his rehabilitation is already in view. We forgive our Caesars their Cleopatras.
What's far more dangerous is what Petraeus represents: a military machine whose budget equals that of the rest of the world's combined, tempting generals and politicians alike to believe we can impose our will anywhere we wish for whatever reason. We've come a long from Woodrow Wilson's "war to end all wars" to the normalization of war by modern military planning, which now anticipates and prepares for wars that don't exist and may not occur until decades into the future.♦
To read responses, click here.
Now, however, America's vaunted military has come to the rescue. The retired four-star General David Petraeus, lately tasked with reforming the CIA, turns out to have been even working harder in the sack with his biographer— shades of John Edwards and Rielle Hunter.
Meanwhile, John Allen, Petraeus's four-star successor on the front lines of the Afghan war— that is, Tampa, Florida— has apparently found sufficient time between battles to generate more than 20,000 pages of e-mail mash notes with another belle, herself the object of hate mail from Petraeus's lady love.
Both men, it seems, also had enough leisure time to intervene in a custody battle on behalf of the twin sister of the second lady, while the latter pair have regularly crashed social functions at the White House. You can't make this stuff up, except in script rejects for "Dallas."
Remember Stormin' Norman?
On the back burner sits General Jeffrey Sinclair, accused of molesting and/or sodomizing five women, mostly his subordinates. On other burners we find the junkets of General William Ward, head of America's "Africa Command," and the navy commander who showed up with a drunken crew at a Russian port. Apparently a $700 billion annual budget can buy you plenty of good times, even if it can't buy you a successful war.
Which brings me to a more serious problem. We Americans may not be good at winning wars, but we still lionize our military. Remember when Norman Schwarzkopf was all the rage? Tommy Franks? Colin Powell was tipped for president on the basis of that turkey shoot in Desert Storm; even his gulling by W. into making the nonexistent case for Saddam Hussein's missile sites in front of a world audience hardly dimmed his luster.
Obama, who opposed the Iraq war before he got stuck with it, welcomed Powell's imprimatur on his run for the White House in 2008. Once you've got those four stars on your shoulder, it's hard to knock 'em off.
After Vietnam
Maybe it all goes back to George Washington, a lousy general— only his British opponents were worse— but a military hero, who planted the fatal seed of war-worship in our national culture.
Military hero worship suffered a serious glitch in Vietnam, whose field marshal, William Westmoreland, faded away in disgrace after monumental defeat. The military and its political supporters dealt with this problem by fighting only wars we were guaranteed to win through the application of overwhelming force against hopelessly inferior opponents. Desert Storm— the invasion of Iraq in 1991— was the prototype of such wars, and Operation Enduring Freedom—the war fought 12 years later to topple Saddam—was supposed to be a similar cakewalk. It didn't work out that way, though.
It was at this point that David Petraeus rode to the rescue. Petraeus made his reputation with the Surge, a mopping-up operation based on enlisting Sunnis beset by Al Qaeda, Saddam loyalists, and a newly-empowered Shi'ite majority bent on vengeance for centuries of Sunni domination. The calculation of this "counterinsurgency" strategy was cynical: By arming the Sunnis, we helped set the stage for future civil war in Iraq while opening an exit for ourselves from an enterprise that had spun hopelessly out of control.
Our friends, the Afghans
Petraeus sold the same strategy to Obama for America's other failed war in Afghanistan. Fully half of our troop losses in Afghanistan have come as a result of the second Surge. In gratitude for our help, the Afghans we've trained and armed have turned their weapons on us, while Afghan warlords prepare for the next round of battle against the Taliban foes we've failed to vanquish, plus of course each other.
Petraeus was treated with kid gloves in his recent closed-door testimony to Congress on the Benghazi consulate fiasco, and his rehabilitation is already in view. We forgive our Caesars their Cleopatras.
What's far more dangerous is what Petraeus represents: a military machine whose budget equals that of the rest of the world's combined, tempting generals and politicians alike to believe we can impose our will anywhere we wish for whatever reason. We've come a long from Woodrow Wilson's "war to end all wars" to the normalization of war by modern military planning, which now anticipates and prepares for wars that don't exist and may not occur until decades into the future.♦
To read responses, click here.
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