So said W. Bruce Lincoln somewhere in his fine biography of Tsar Nicholas I. The disgrace of General David Petraeus, until yesterday this generation’s combination Patton, Pershing, Lee and Grant, illustrates the maxim.
At least, the Official Story is wildly improbable. Supposedly, the FBI began investigating General Petraeus months ago, discovered that he’d seduced a journalist (or maybe she, him), concluded that this indiscretion by the director of the CIA was a national security risk, and didn’t bother to inform the White House until late last Tuesday or the Congressional intelligence committees at all. If that’s true, the whole FBI should be cashiered, because it’s clearly suffering from a culture of lassitude and incompetence.
What would be more probable?
A story much rebroadcast in the dexterosphere says that the White House was informed promptly and deliberately sat on the story, leaving a blackmailable official in a sensitive position, in order to avoid a pre-election scandal. I wish that were an absurd idea.
Even more do I wish that Paul Rahe’s theory – that the general was blackmailed into supporting the Administration’s initial (now inoperative) claim that all the trouble in Benghazi was the product of a cheesy YouTube video – were less believable than the official line.
Ann Althouse doesn’t have a detailed theory but thinks that the Benghazi debacle or disagreements about drone warfare are the most likely reasons for the sudden resignation; the affair, she implies, was just a convenient pretext.
There certainly is a whiff of pretext here. Once General Petraeus publicly disclosed the affair, the danger of blackmail vanished, and it’s been a long time since adultery, in and of itself, has been treated as a disqualification for public office (except sometimes for Republican candidates). If the Administration had wanted to retain the CIA director, his misconduct would have been labeled “personal and private”, a matter for him to work out with Mrs. Petraeus and their children.
Probability says that persons who had the President’s ear wanted Petraeus out and stumbled on a plausible reason to oust him. Maybe they were just lucky. Maybe they scoured his life searching for a scandal. We can be sure that they’re now working hard to make sure that we never learn anything more and that the improbable story goes into the history books. It would be interesting to know who they are and what the general was doing that distressed them.
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