The Weekly Screed (#549)

Ask Dave
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Right now, he’s seasoning in Langley. But five years from
now, America is going to want General David H. Petraeus,
overwhelmingly, as next President of the United States. Well, not
exactly “President.”

Petraeus, first, is the greatest military celebrity of our time. I
mean, really — forget the Alamo, remember the Surge! Second, Americans
have always loved generals, and Petraeus is the successor to our last
great (unrequited) chicken-brass love — General Colin Powell. Remember
how we liked Ike, and how we loved Teddy? Chaaaarge!

I know. In ‘04, we flirted with — and spurned — Gen. Wesley Clark, but
he doesn’t count. He’s a Democrat. A Democratic general in the U.S.
Army is like a two-headed piglet in a twelve-pig litter — more
interesting than the other little porkers but nothing you’d want to
pick up and cuddle. The last (and only) Democratic general to win was
Franklin Pierce in 1852 — whose presidency was universally regarded as
a fiasco.

Luckily, Dave’s a Republican. By 2016, he’ll be a shoo-in.

So, let’s not dwell on the fact that Petraeus has never actually won a
war. Nowadays, America doesn’t win — or even have — “wars.” We have
presidential hissy-fits which, ironically, the Pentagon tends at first
to discourage. But these adventures are always egged on by
draft-exempt Republicans and rubber-stamped by spineless liberals.
Eventually, they become either abortive retreats (Beirut, ‘83, Desert
Storm, ‘91) or endless quagmires. The latter tends to be the norm.

We plunge in, raise hell, put up flags and promise to give the natives
stuff they don’t understand and can’t digest, like democracy and
hamburgers. By and by, inevitably, the invadees, who maybe once
welcomed our troops, come to either hate us or depend on us for bribes
and jobs (while still, of course, hating us), after which this mutant
offspring of executive ego enters its counterinsurgency — or
“meatgrinder” — phase. Day after day, a few American kids and a few
more of the locals die squalidly while truckloads of U.S. taxes gush
down a rathole 10,000 miles from the taxpayers who coughed up the
dough (hoping to maybe underwrite better schools, green technology, a
college loan or just an unemployment check to get through next week).

For the briefly reluctant military, the silver lining in the classic
American quagmire (CAQ) is that it offers West Point’s new breed of
philosopher-generals — like Petraeus — cool opportunities to spin new
theories of war, like “counterinsurgency,” Gen. Dave’s specialty —
which is the Pentagon version of supply-side economics. (The idea, I
think, is that, in a war where nobody, anywhere, wants you to stay,
you dig in deeper, pass out brochures and say, “OK, we’ll leave. But
first, we’re gonna make you like us.”)

Future President Dave has already proved his White House bona fides.
He served as a sort of surrogate president after the regular president
(Bush) lost interest in all his little wars. This surrogacy tradition
dates back to the Sixties, when LBJ and Tricky Dick passed the Vietnam
buck to a couple of fall-guy generals, William Westmoreland and
Creighton Abrams. Given the same crummy job, Petraeus turned the
tables. While Pontius Bush washed quagmire off his hands, Dave stepped
up and became an instant media darling. Pretty soon, Petraeus was
Bush’s favorite stand-in. Dubya got into the habit of answering every
war question by just saying, “Jeez, I don’t know. Ask Dave!”

Petraeus’ ascension, from two-star Pentagon grunt to four-star icon of
military intelligence, is one of the blessings of no-win heroism. As
we first learned in Korea, a good, lingering CAQ cycles legions of
starry-eyed shavetails through the combat zone’s rear echelons,
boosting pay, speeding promotions and piling up decorations like
cordwood (while very few officers get hurt). Petraeus is the
apotheosis of the quagmire era. He struck an awesome figure in recent
Congressional testimony. The left side of his tunic was a veritable
Las Vegas Strip of medals, service ribbons, citations, unit awards.
merit badges and other manly gewgaws. His jewelry made him so lopsided
that a bird colonel had to be assigned to sit next to Petraeus, just
to keep him from tipping over.

Perhaps Petraeus’ clearest claim to the White House is that he has not
only seen the future; he has lived it. The Pentagon wherein Dave
thrives has become one of history’s largest corporate cartels. Its
business consists almost solely of lobbying Congress for breathtaking
amounts of cash, which pump slowly into the development of weapons
systems of such magnitude and complexity that they can never possibly
be finished, and — if they were — would be useless in any conceivable
conflict. This Pentagon structure foreshadows an America oligarchy now
being dictated by anti-government zealots funded by the same
businesses that feed off the Pentagon: A handful of the rich and
powerful reigning over a vast, meek, underpaid peasantry that follows
orders blindly.

Petraeus knows his peasantry better than any other Pentagon lord. The
armies he has commanded consist only partly of regular soldiers.
Outnumbering these loyal volunteers at each U.S. colonial fort are
corporate mercenaries and a vast rabble of unmotivated local militias
who teeter perpetually on the brink of mutiny. If Dave is as smart as
he looks, he has noted that the same unreliable and demoralized
mixture of troops characterized the Roman and British Empires as each
colossus was dying.
We need Dave in the Oval Office because soon all our wars and outposts
are going to be life-sucking quagmires. When Dave takes over, we’ll
still be in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and probably Pakistan — and
Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Kosovo, Israel, Germany, Bahrain, Guam,
Guantánamo, Israel, Greece, Bulgaria, Kygyzstan, Saudi Arabia, Poland,
Singapore, Qatar, Holland, Portugal, Turkey, etc. Of all the guys we
can send to cheer up the troops, only Dave will have the combat cred
to look those poor bastards in the eye and say, no! You’re not the
21st-century version of the forsaken Roman infantry, who were
forgotten back home and surrounded in the middle of nowhere by angry
mobs, turncoat native troops and cutthroat soldiers of fortune. We’ve
got your back. Honest!

As our colonies rebel, as we move from the bourgeois luxury of a
Presidency to the feudal necessity of an Emperor, it will be fit and
meet that the first guy on the throne has a name that rhymes with
Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, Gaius, Commodus…