The resignation of CIA director David Petraeus, a retired Army four-star general, has the makings of a true Watergate repeat, with the proviso that no one died in Watergate.
Presumably Petraeus could, if he wished, if his loyalties are not entirely to the political figure of the moment, explain everything that happened in Benghazi, from the consulate’s reason for existence to the murders of Ambassador Stevens and the others.
But will he? “Betray US” was not invented by the Left, in their full-page ads in the New York Times, but by some of Petraeus’s fellow serving officers long before he won his stars. They felt that he was not a true leader, in that he did not look after his troops, that he put himself first, that he was a political soldier always.
At the time President Bush appointed him to save the bacon in Iraq, I hoped they were wrong, the few of them I knew, merely bitter over old slights or differences of opinion. And the general did perform memorably well in the Surge.
Now we’ll surely see the truth of his character. There would seem to be nothing preventing him from testifying to Congress. He himself has publicized the fault (infidelity) that might have prevented him from being candid, if others wished to use it to blackmail him into silence.
Now we’ll see whether the general really is a true leader of more than a winning moment in an otherwise lost campaign, a campaign lost by the man who would seem to have the most to lose in the Benghazi affair, President Obama.
UPDATE: PJMedia’s Michael Ledeen raises some obvious and not-so-obvious questions. For instance: “Don’t you love counterintelligence? You start with the theory that he was blackmailed out of office, and you quickly move to a theory that he was blackmailed into remaining in office. That’s why ‘wilderness of mirrors’ is such a good description…”
MORE: Michael Yon, who knows and has worked with both Petraeus and his mistress, Paula Broadwell (herself a former Army officer) offers his positive thoughts about them here.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 