I've been warned but I'm not sure about what. I've printed everything in case I may be doing something wrong.
I watched Oliver Stone on Piers Morgan's CNN Interview program the other night. He has written a book " History Untold"
He made a reference to Petraeus and his pumped up reputation.
Mr. Stone's experience stems for his service in Vietnam What he is not aware of is how well the U.S, history is understood in Europe by the generation ahead of him with experience in the second world war.
Anyone who lived in the last of colonial times recognised the serious errors in E.S. judgment in their various expeditions in the Middle East.
Vietnam was known as French Indo China.Algiers was another French Colony. France endured years of terrorism in the homeland before they were able to extricate themselves from those two countries.
There was nothing dignified about the end of the British Empire.
There's nothing new about Generals becoming puffed up with their own importance during various conflagrations
I can name a few.
It's the propaganda nation's engage to encourage the common folk to endure and accept unimaginable sacrifice and loss.
I'm profoundly grateful to have lived long enough to see a generation of writers and film-makers of sufficient reputation and influence, capable of cutting through centuries of B.S. TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
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Reputation, Reputation, Reputation
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 13, 2012 295 Comments
WASHINGTON
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As Lyndon Johnson said, the two things that make leaders stupid are envy and sex.
Macbeth kills a king out of envy. Egged on by an envious Iago, Othello
smothers his wife out of a crazed fear of her having sex with his
lieutenant.
Now another charismatic general has shattered his life and career over
sex. When you’ve got a name like a Greek hero, and a nickname like a
luscious fruit, isn’t hubris ripe to follow?
It’s been a steep fall for Peaches Petraeus, once the darling of
Congress and journalists, Republicans and Democrats, Paula Broadwell and
Jill Kelley.
Washington is suffused with schadenfreude. Yet President Obama and
others felt genuinely sad to see a man so controlling about integrity
and image — he warned protégés that “someone is always watching” — spin
out of control on integrity and image. As Shakespeare wrote in
“Othello”: “Reputation, reputation, reputation.”
As a West Point cadet, David Petraeus clambered up the social ladder by
winning the superintendent’s daughter; now he has been brought down by
his camp followers clambering up the social ladder.
Even when he was the C.I.A. director, Petraeus’s ego was so wrapped up
in being a shiny military idol that, according to The Washington Post,
he recently surprised guests at a D.C. dinner when he arrived to speak
wearing his medals on the lapel of his suit jacket.
His fall started as Sophocles and turned sophomoric, a mind-boggling
mélange of “From Here to Eternity,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “The Real
Housewives of Centcom,” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” It
features toned arms, slinky outfits, a cat fight, titillating e-mails, a
military more consumed with sex than violence, a plot with more
inconceivable twists than “Homeland,” and a Twitter’s-delight lexicon:
an “embedded” mistress named Broadwell, a biography called “All In,” an
other-other woman of Middle East ancestry who was a “social liaison” to
the military, a shirtless F.B.I. agent crushing on the
losing-her-shirt-to-debt Tampa socialite, a pair of generals helping the
socialite’s twin sister with a custody case, and lawyers and
crisis-management experts linked to Monica Lewinsky, John Edwards and
the ABC show “Scandal.”
“This is The National Enquirer, ” an alarmed Senator Dianne Feinstein
told Wolf Blitzer of CNN. If only it were that highbrow. Now that erotic
activity is entwined with the Internet, rather than closeted in
hideaway Capitol offices and Oval Office pantries, it’s even more likely
to be a trip wire for history.
It is disturbing that an ethically sketchy, politically motivated F.B.I.
agent could spark an incendiary federal investigation tunneling into
private lives to help a woman he liked and later blow it up to hurt a
president he didn’t like.
It’s also worrisome that the nation’s spymaster — who had presided in a
military where adultery could result in court-martial — could not have
found a more clandestine manner of talking naughty to his biographer
babe than a Gmail drop box, a semiprivate file-sharing system used by
terrorists, teenagers and authors.
It’s understandable that men accustomed to being away from their
families and cloistered with other men in Muslim countries where
drinking and blowing off steam are frowned upon might get used to
cavorting on e-mail.
But Petraeus should have realized that the Chinese and Russians were
snooping and sent Paula Broadwell an Enigma e-mail: “I would like your
insights into the debate over COIN versus CT in Helmand Province. Our
HVT kills are falling a little short of the mark. Let’s discuss.”
And Broadwell could have sent ones more like: “I’ve been reading Chapter
3 notes and the Galula theory of counterinsurgency confuses me. Hope
you can clarify.”
The scandal is a good reminder that, although John McCain and Sarah
Palin urge total trust and blank checks for the generals, these guys are
human beings working under extremely stressful circumstances, and their
judgments are not beyond reproach.
Petraeus’s Icarus flight began when he set himself above President Obama.
Accustomed to being a demigod, expert at polishing his own celebrity and
swaying public opinion, Petraeus did not accept the new president’s
desire to head for the nearest exit ramp on Afghanistan in 2009. The
general began lobbying for a surge in private sessions with reporters
and undercutting the president, who was trying to make a searingly hard
call.
Petraeus rolled the younger commander in chief into going ahead with a
bound-to-fail surge in Afghanistan, just as, half a century earlier, the
C.I.A. had rolled Jack Kennedy into going ahead with the bound-to-fail
Bay of Pigs scheme. Both missions defied logic, but the untested
presidents put aside their own doubts and instincts, caving to
experience.
Once in Afghanistan, Petraeus welcomed prominent conservative hawks from
Washington think tanks. As Greg Jaffe wrote in The Washington Post,
they were “given permanent office space at his headquarters and access
to military aircraft to tour the battlefield. They provided advice to
field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the commanders
were getting from their immediate bosses.”
So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and
maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal.
T
The toughest part of this for The General is going to be when he tries to placate his wife. She isn't buying his story of of ' an error in judgement '. Nor should she.
ReplyDeleteThe comments that follow the article give added value to readers.
ReplyDeleteTrouble in Paradise?
ReplyDeleteTampa has invested heavily in the Petraeus brand. They are in total denial. There is even a street named after the guy.