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.
= new reply since forum marked as read
