It doesn’t make sense, like the failure to reinforce Benghazi
for 9/11 and like a number of other scandals connected with this
administration. The pieces of the jigsaw don’t fit together.
First, the letter. General Petraeus’s letter of resignation
stated in part:
Yesterday afternoon, I went to the White House and asked the
President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my
position as D/CIA. After being married for over 37 years, I showed
extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such
behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an
organization such as ours. This afternoon, the President graciously
accepted my resignation.
I am more familiar with British than American military
traditions and codes of conduct, but I imagine they are highly
similar. And one of the most binding codes I know is that, in a
sexual scandal, come what may, an officer and a gentleman does not
mention a woman’s name or reveal information which allows the
woman’s identity to be guessed.
General Petraeus seems something like the Platonic ideal of an
officer and a gentleman, and yet the identity of the woman involved
very quickly became public knowledge. Why did he have to mention
it? Yet, typically of this murky affair, we are not yet sure who
did first mention it.
General Petraeus has embarrassed and humiliated:
a) Himself;
b) His wife and family;
c) The woman in the affair;
d) His corps;
e) His service;
f) His country.
He has also, in a sense, given aid and comfort to the enemy, not
merely the Taliban or whoever the CIA is fighting against, but all
the enemies of America who will rejoice in its humiliation and in
what may be, to them, further proof of its decadence. This is not
so much because he has had an affair — many men have — but
because he has shown himself apparently unable to handle the
consequences sensibly. As a criminal lawyer, I have learnt to be
surprised at no human behavior, but everything about Petraeus that
we know suggests that this behavior is grotesquely out of
character.
There is the whole odd question of why, if his unbending sense
of honor made him confess to the affair, did he embark on it in the
first place, and, instead of queerly resigning, confess in such a
way as to do his family and the others involved the greatest
possible damage?
There has never been stronger stench of conspiracy and cover-up.
“Watergate” and “impeachment” suddenly hang heavy in the air.
Among the things that don’t make sense is that Petraeus’s
disgrace, and the hurt caused to others – including the United
States of America - was unnecessary. Petraeus’s letter of
resignation could have stated: “I … asked the President to be
allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position” —and
left it at that. Let others make of it what they would. There are
all manner of possible reasons why a man might choose to resign
from such an onerous task, and one, moreover, for which he was not
trained.
Furthermore, why did Petraeus choose to confess and end his
career now, rather than either sooner or later? Was he being
blackmailed? Obviously the huge question that dominates the
political horizon is: was he politically knifed in the hope it
would silence him on Benghazi? But he can still — and must — be
compelled to testify.
Then again, while there may be security reasons to prohibit
people with access to top secrets from having affairs, people with
real power — and Petraeus was one of the most powerful man in the
country — are not as a rule penalized for it. Eisenhower reputedly
had an affair with his driver when he was Commanding General in
Europe in World War II. JFK’s affairs were notorious. McArthur had
a mistress. Indeed, I can recall no previous cases of anyone at the
top of American political or military life being brought down by
having an affair, at least in modern times.
Bill Clinton, of course, survived a series of sex scandals as
president, culminating in a direct, public lie to the American
people, captured forever on television. All the excuses were
trotted out for him by the Democrat-aligned media that will not be
made for Petraeus. Teddy Kennedy was ruined politically by
Chappaquiddick, but that was because it proved him to be a coward
as well as a liar. Going back in history a little, Nelson,
Wellington and Napoleon were not, of course, American, but their
names remind one that great military leaders throughout history
have been human. It is said, though I am not sure whether or not
this is fiction, that Caesar’s legions had a song:
Home we bring your bald whore-monger,
Romans, lock your wives away…
Historically, cover-ups have a way of becoming worse politically
than the original scandal. Suddenly, this scandal may be too big
for even the mainstream media’s Obama lackeys to ignore.
