The higher the
monkey climbs, the more it shows its ass. - Haitian proverb
Once upon a time,
back in 2007, I referred in a pretty vitriolic opinion piece to David
Petraeus as “Bagwan Petraeus,” such was his mystical swami-status
with politicians and media-flaks alike. He was portrayed as a
military genius, a warrior-poet, a possible future candidate for the
highest office in the United States government.
He is today
portrayed as the great man with hamartia, a fatal flaw . . .
in the case of Petraeus, lust.
The classic tragedy
narrative will probably hold sway now and in the future, because to
admit that he was never that great man would expose the group-think
stupidity of all those who claimed to see this au naturel
emperor's exquisite ensemble in the first place. That would include
most of the nation's legislators and most of the nation's well-paid
commentariat.
The bald truth is
that Petraeus never had an original thought in his life, and every
one of his military operations – seen now from comparatively brief
hindsight – were worse than failures.
His “genius”
book on counterinsurgency was an Army Field Manual – which is to
books what a middle school venereal disease warning film is to a
documentary. Counterinsurgency doctrine has never worked, except
where the strategy was tantamount to genocide, but Petraeus managed
to convince any number of people that his boring, overgeneralized,
and useless field manual was the work of a martial wunderkind. One
honest military critic called it “unreadable.” His military
career was relatively undistinguished, and yet people were comparing
him to Grant, Pershing, and Eisenhower. He was shot once during a
training exercise by an accidental discharge, and he broke his pelvis
once when his parachute malfunctioned during a stateside training
jump.
Then he was elevated
by hype to the Grand Poobah of Iraq, whereupon he initiated a
media-strategy called The Surge. The essence of The Surge was, in
fact, to bribe the people who were most effectively fighting American
troops. He paid them to stop shooting at Americans – for the time.
Many of his Surge allies among the Sunni are now fighters with ISIS.
The Surge scheme was ultimately aimed at reunifying Iraq (failed),
by de-Ba'athification (backfired), and revision of the Constitution
to reconcile Shia and Sunni (resulted in civil war). In fact, with
The Surge, the Sunni-Shia slaughter massively accelerated, and the
victorious Shia so maltreated the Sunni that the recruitment process
for ISIS might be said to have begun with The Surge. Pure genius.
David Petraeus is a
perfect example of what Alasdair MacIntyre once described with regard
to most bureaucratic “experts.” “[E]ffectiveness [is] a
quality widely imputed to managers and bureaucrats both by themselves
and others, but in fact a quality which rarely exists apart from its
imputation.” This explains why bond traders continue to run the
world economy, even after they have contributed so substantially to
its rot; and it explains why people – past and present – can say
something as preposterous as “David Petraeus is a military genius,”
without being ridiculed into a fetal position in the closet.
MacIntyre compares
the transient signs of managerial success to a jackleg preacher lucky
enough to publicly pray for rain at just the moment when a drought
ends. Military “science,” just like other social “sciences,”
is no science at all, since it cannot formulate the kind of
certainties as, for example, the boiling point of water or the
trajectory of a satellite's orbit. Expertise, then, is not
reflective of predictive knowledge, but of the ability to convince
people that one is an expert.
Petraeus's
not-so-worshipful acquaintances from the past describe him as a
calculating political creature, disliked by subordinates who felt
used by him for his own career advancement, exquisitely attuned to
the egos of his superiors, and always on the lookout for recognition
and advancement. In the psycho-babble of our age – a narcissist, a
man for whom others were looking glasses with which he could
constantly slake his own insatiable need for affirmation. Perhaps
lust is too superficial a verdict, when, with fascinated revulsion,
we picture him and his hagiographer, Paula Broadwell, under his oaken
desk making the beast with two backs.
Look at me, he says,
during his refractory interludes, showing her his “black books.”
I am the leader of the Central Intelligence Agency. I know all the
big secrets. I am powerful beyond measure.
His first big move
in life, upon graduating from West Point – that finishing school on
the Hudson – was to marry the Academy Superintendent's daughter,
Holly Knowlton – now humiliated by his famous affair with a younger
woman.
He is in the news
again now, many months after the scandal broke, because he has plead
guilty to sharing state secrets with his courtesan – a scandal to
civil libertarians, because Petraeus received a slap on the wrist for
showing his black books and his peepee, while civic-minded
whistleblowers – like Manning, Snowden, Kiriakou, et al – got prison or
exile.
I suppose that is a
scandal, though I honestly don't care if every state secret there is
gets splashed across the front page of every paper in the country.
I'm not a patriot in any sense of the word. It's hypocrisy, yes, but
is the association between hypocrisy and power really all that
shocking? People are raising hell about Democratic presidential
hopeful Hillary Clinton playing cache-cache with her emails,
but few care about the deadly and pivotal role she and her henchman,
John Negroponte, played in consolidating the 2009 coup d'etat in
Honduras (because it is okay for Democrats to overthrow governments
and make war abroad, just not Republicans).
Hypocrisy is not my
takeaway from the final impact of King David's fall.
Petraeus is not
pathological. He is the norm for all those who can and do rise to
power in our time and place. What is closer to a pathology is the
way we – regardless of where we fall on anyone's political
spectrum – are constantly on the lookout for saviors and experts
and Great Leaders. We have surrendered our agency to be clients.
Just as Petraeus was
the hopeful Great Leader for some, those of us who aren't casting our
gazes along the horizon for a General are casting those same gazes
for a Progressive or a Populist or a principled Libertarian. It's
the same con. We are, I am, the Client in search of the Great
Manager, that someone somewhere who can be “effective.”
The epiphany we
should have as we picture David and Paula grunting on the rug is that
thinking of Petraeus as the exception is our collective delusion.
They are all emperors without any clothes. Their effectiveness “does
not [can not] exist apart from its imputation.” A corpse will not
be resuscitated no matter who is the chief among the flies.
Only God can do that.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
My book, Borderline – Reflections on War, Sex, and Church, is
available from Wipf and Stock Publishers at
http://wipfandstock.com/borderline.html
.
