ROVING
EYE Skyfall, starring David
Petraeus By Pepe Escobar
My name is Petraeus. David Petraeus. Move
over, Bond, with your Skyfall; this is the
real deal, a certified political/national security
blockbuster to end them all.
This is how
Hollywood would market it; "He had the nation's
highest security clearance. But above all he was
an embedded lady killer."
Now for the
casting. Daniel Craig could easily play The
General, although The General would rather
teleguide a Hellfire than an
Aston Martin, and
wear a "fruit salad" (as in myriad decorations)
instead of a killer Tom Ford suit. Demi Moore -
sultry as ever - could play "Paula". Assorted
Iraqis and Afghans would play "collateral damage".
Meanwhile, murky does not even begin to
describe alleged reality - as in the director of
the Central Intelligence Agency, retired Gen David
Petraeus, resigning over a bedroom farce only two
days after President Barack Obama is re-elected,
amid crossfire accusations raging for weeks
regarding what the CIA was exactly doing in Libya,
that godforsaken land liberated by the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization and now ruled by a
bunch of militias.
As whodunits go, this
plot is going nowhere. Nobody knows why this
blockbuster was leaked last Friday - by the way
only one day after President Obama himself had
learned about it (on the other hand attorney
general Eric Holder of The Fast and the
Furious fame knew about it since "late
summer", according to the proverbial anonymous,
"US officials").
Nobody knows what the
Federal Bureau of Investigation was planning to do
before all hell broke loose - considering that its
four-month investigation had unearthed that
Petraeus and his lover, West Point graduate,
fitness fanatic, adoring biographer Paula
Broadwell, had not breached national security.
Or
maybe they had. For starters, The General -
possessor of the nation's highest national
security clearance - was using a mere G-mail
account to talk dirty to Paula, using
what The
Washington Post gleefully described as "a
tactic of terrorists who are rightly wary of
espionage". And when it was leaked that the FBI
found no "major security breaches", this means
there WAS a security breach.
My
guy The bedroom farce elements are enough
to have Moliere rolling in his tombe. The whole
thing started when Floridian Jill Kelley
complained about receiving harassing emails from
Paula, the adoring co-author (with Washington Post
journalist Vernon Loeb) of the full-access
biography All In: The Education of General
David Petraeus, published in January. Paula
and Petraeus had been getting down to the
nitty-gritty since November 2011, two months after
Obama appointed him as head of the CIA. Talk about
an embedded biographer.
So Paula must have
thought she was in a sexy quadrangle, not
triangle. She obviously didn't know much about
Jill Kelley - the third woman in the farce - the
other three sides being Paula and Petraeus' wife,
the now "furious" Holly. The Tampa Bay Times
described The General as a grandfather to Kelley's
family.
Kelley also happened to be a
critical player; a "social liaison" to the
Pentagon's supreme, shadowy,
counterterrorism/killing machine, the Fort
Bragg-based Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC). It's crucial to know that it was the JSOC
that allegedly led the CIA and the Pentagon into
what had happened during the attack against the US
consulate in Benghazi in which ambassador Chris
Stevens was killed.
None of this obviously
mattered to Paula; in the harassing emails that
culminated in this bombshell, she bluntly ordered
Kelley to "stay away from my guy".
As for
"my guy", he has multiple questions to answer.
First of all; why did the CIA tell the White House
that the Benghazi drama was provoked by that
stupid "Prophet Muhammad" YouTube video - and not
an attack coordinated by previously NATO-enabled
Salafi-jihadis?
And then, no less
important; why did The General not decide to
commit his public seppuku over two weeks ago, when
FBI agents talked to him in person about the
investigation? Was it his paramount reason the
desire not to bomb the Obama administration and
practically hand the election over to the
Republican Party? Or maybe he was hoping the whole
thing would simply be covered
up, like a Pashtun wedding party obliterated
by a Hellfire missile?
According to The
New York Times, the whole thing blew over in late
October after an "unidentified" FBI employee - now
identified as sending photos of his shirtless
torso to Jill Kelley - spilled the beans to
Congress Republicans all the way to House Majority
Leader Eric Cantor. Nobody knows what was this
FBI's informer agenda.
In a nutshell, the
FBI didn't manage to keep the investigation
secret. Cantor, according to the Times, had a
serious meeting with FBI director Robert Mueller
III on Halloween; then nobody knows what happened
till Election Day, November 6, when the FBI went
by the book and told James Clapper Jr, the
Director of National Intelligence, about the
bedroom farce. To say that Mueller and Cantor also
have a few questions to answer is the
understatement of the year.
With US
corporate media now totally berserk, the master
narrative remains that The Samurai General did the
honorable thing by resigning. It all goes back to
good ol' American Puritanism. You can be a killing
machine, responsible for the death of untold
numbers of civilians. But don't you dare betraying
your devoted wife.
The General may be
thinking he chose the wrong profession. What an
unforgiving environment; James Bond gets to wear
fabulous suits, drinks countless martinis, drives
an Aston Martin, shoots every bad guy in sight and
beds every foxy lady in the universe.
The failed warrior David
Petraeus was more of a PR genius than a samurai to
begin with. His cinematic model would be Captain
Willard as played by Martin Sheen in Coppola's
Apocalypse Now; the warrior intellectual.
Petraeus, who for quite a while actively
positioned himself as a possible presidential
candidate in 2012, was clever enough to sell to US
public opinion - and gullible mainstream media -
the notion that he was a winner in both Iraq and
Afghanistan. These are two monumental fallacies.
The revolving door ethos in Washington -
in this case between the Pentagon and the CIA -
reached new heights of absurdity when Petraeus,
who adapted his counterinsurgency tactics from
Iraq to Afghanistan, as in take, clear, hold and
build, was put in charge, as CIA director, of
analyzing ... the counterinsurgency in
Afghanistan. The Taliban must be laughing all
across the Hind Kush about Petraeus's
counterinsurgency "success" - which, by the way,
he imposed, along with other Pentagon generals, on
Obama in late 2009.
Petraeus is a product
of the Pentagon. He could never, by himself, get
rid of the inbuilt logic of Endless War,
established by Republican strategists of what
French political scientist Alain Joxe has
characterized as "war neoliberalism".
Iraq
and Afghanistan were pure manifestations of "war
neoliberalism". Petraeus's "surge" in Iraq was a
sham. When he arrived with his suitcases full of
cash to convince Sunni guerrillas to fight
al-Qaeda in Iraq, and not American soldiers, the
real surge was already being accomplished; this
was the surge led by the Iraqi Interior Ministry
and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which had
practically succeeded in the ethnic cleansing of
Baghdad and surrounding areas, reverting the
population balance to the benefit of Shi'ites. As
for the Sunni guerrillas, at least they could
pocket American money while biding their time to
continue their fight against a Shi'ite-dominated
government in Baghdad.
Obama's foreign
policy team certainly thought that Petraeus
counterinsurgency mumbo-jumbo would allow Iraq -
and later Afghanistan - at least some sort of what
could be dubbed inter-communitarian democracy,
saving American face in terms of a troop exit that
would not replicate the last helicopter leaving a
Saigon roof in 1975.
But the fact is
Petraeus did not win any hearts and minds in
either Iraq or Afghanistan; his take, clear, hold
and build tactics ultimately led to nowhere in
both cases - and we're not even talking about
serious instances of torture, extrajudicial
killings, illegal detentions and widespread shadow
war. His "mini-surge" could only have had a shot
at succeeding in Afghanistan (and that's quite a
stretch) if it was not mini; if he had had access
to hundreds of thousands of troops - something
politically unacceptable in the US.
Then
there's Benghazi. What may have really happened is
that the US consulate in Benghazi was a sort of
CIA safe house/spy house - thus under Petraeus
responsibility, not the State Dept. This neatly
dovetails with "Paula" casually saying, at the
University of Denver on October 26, that
"prisoners" were
being held at the consulate (the CIA
vehemently denied it, so there must be a degree of
truth to it).
That the consulate was
attacked by Salafi-jihadis is out of the question.
The State Department may have been the fall guys -
while Petraeus/CIA got away with their
incompetence. Well, until the bedroom farce
exploded.
It remains to be seen whether
anyone in Washington will dare asking the
pertinent questions. It remains to be seen whether
Petraeus's relentless, hyper-counterproductive
(not to mention collateral damage-laden) drone
wars will be reevaluated. It remains to be seen
whether Obama 2.0 will decide to practice
diplomacy - and not shadow war - in the
intersection between Central and South Asia.
The inestimable Ray McGovern, a former CIA
analyst, suggests Obama should stop listening to "
faux experts - the neocon specialists at
Brookings, AEI and elsewhere" and instead go for
"genuine experts like former national intelligence
officer for the Near East Paul Pillar, former
State Department chief of staff Lawrence
Wilkerson, and military historian and practitioner
Andrew Bacevich (Lt Col, USA, ret). These are
straight-shooters; they have no interest in 'long
wars'; they will tell you the truth; all you need
to do is listen."
Forget about straight
shooters. The Acting CIA Director is now Michael
Morell, a puppet of counter-terrorism czar John
Brennan. As for The General, what a sorry exit; he
gets no fancy car, no martinis, no Tom Ford killer
suit, he doesn't save the world. And in the end he
doesn't even get the girl.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
