Prediction of Petraeus's fate, a year and a half ago.

[JackRiddler]

Last edited Wed Nov 14, 2012, 11:46 AM - Edit history (2)

On May 2nd, 2011, after a busy week in which Obama reshuffled his cabinet (Gates out, Panetta to Pentagon), published his birth certificate and humiliated Donald Trump, and then announced the killing of Bin Ladin, I wrote:

Petraeus -- neutralized, withdrawn from his Afghanistan flag-waving photo-ops and sent into the bowels of the CIA, an agency with a proven history of stimying and dispensing with directors considered hostile to it.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1011589

Make of it what you will. For the rationale of my thinking, then and now: see Post 7, below.

[teddy51]

1. But what on earth does that have to do with him having an affair?

[JackRiddler]

7. There's always a way to bring someone down... (Post #7)

Petraeus and his love-dick made it easy, but there would have been another way.

He was the rat sent into the snake's pit. Or if you prefer, the snake in the rat's pit, all the same to me. Either way - let's stick with the first metaphor - you don't wonder for long which of the snakes bit the rat. You just know it was inevitable.

CIA and Pentagon are organs of empire. They exist to commit crimes. One is literally defined by its criminality - the reason for a secret service is to violate the laws of given jurisdictions. Whereas the other one exists to flatten far-away places and murder people wholesale, and have a bunch of statesmen invent reasons why this is just and legal. In combination, they've caused the deaths of many millions around the world, and the classes of architects and commanders -- the snakes and the rats we're trained to call "mister" and "sir" -- have never paid the price. (With the exception of a few individuals; never as a class.)

CIA is a hotbed of bureaucratic in-fighting. A place of many secretive compartments run by capos and intrigants, closed and often hostile to each other in the competition for resources and privileges. A place where there are many ways to be exposed, and where exposure means your end. Where in recent years several directors - Deutch, Goss, now Petraeus - have met with sudden careericides. (And never mind what likely happened to Colby and Casey.)

CIA and JSOC have been struggling for years over which gets the lead in the drone wars. CIA has been winning, more or less. And then Petraeus is sent to run CIA? A suicide mission, surely.

I'm not saying Obama knew what would happen when he appointed Petraeus to the job. He just knew what was likely when he took this showboating little dictator (and potential Republican candidate for president) out of his prominent, "heroic" position in Afghanistan, and sent him to the bowels of Langley.

Bye, bye. Too bad it wasn't The Hague, alongside Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush and Wolfowitz and Powell and Rice and Blair and Straw and Brown and Aznar and Howard. Never forget.

[BlueMan Votes]

2. was he considered 'hostile' to the cia when he was director?

i think that you're kind of stretching things when you say that you predicted his 'fate' -i don't see the word mistress or adultery anywhere.

[JackRiddler]

8. Yes of course.

Military vs. CIA is one of the oldest MIC bureaucratic rivalries going.

More recently, it's been a direct battle over who gets to control the drone wars. (CIA has been winning, and then they send Petraeus to run CIA? Good luck to him.)

See post 7 for more complete version.

If he hadn't made it easy by falling gaga for Broadwell, there would have been another way. There always is.

[fleur-de-lisa]

3. Kind of sick of these 'I told you so' threads! - n/t

[GiaGiovanni]

4. What exactly are we being told?

There are so many stories running around that it's hard to tell what's happening.

[JackRiddler]

10. See post 7, above, for my guess.

[WI_DEM]

11. yeah there have been a lot of them lately

and most of them don't really add up to the authors claim.

[JBoy]

5. If "stimying" means "causing him to bone his biographer"

then you nailed it.

[underthematrix]

6. Oh so interesting.

[WI_DEM]

9. Nice try but I don't think you quite predicted it.

[JackRiddler]

12. Doesn't matter, but see Post 7...

I intuited a likely outcome that appears to have come true; for the more general thinking behind it, see Post 7.

[JackRiddler]

13. bump - pls. see Post #7