Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Let
us turn from the post-Thanksgiving scenes of inflamed mobs clubbing each
other to the ground for a discounted television set to the
comparatively placid boulevards of the Middle East. In Cairo, no sooner
had Hillary Clintonās plane cleared Egyptian air space than Mohamed
Morsi issued one-man constitutional amendments declaring himself and his
Muslim Brotherhood buddies free from judicial oversight and announced
that his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, would be retried for all the stuff
he was acquitted of in the previous trial. Morsi now wields total
control over parliament, the judiciary, and the military to a degree
Mubarak in his jail cell can only marvel at. Old CIA wisdom: He may be
an SOB but heās our SOB. New postāArab Spring CIA wisdom: He may be an
SOB but at least heās not our SOB.
But donāt worry. As Americaās director of national intelligence,
James Clapper, assured the House Intelligence Committee at the time of
Mubarakās fall, the Muslim Brotherhood is a ālargely secularā
organization. The nameās just for show, same as the Episcopal Church.
Which brings us to Intelligence Director Clapperās fellow
intelligence director, General Petraeus. Donāt ask me why thereās a
director of national intelligence and a director of central
intelligence. Something to do with 9/11, after which the government
decided it could use more intelligence. Instead it wound up with more
directors of intelligence, which is the way it usually goes in
Washington. Anyway, I blow hot and cold on the Petraeus sex scandal.
Initially, it seemed the best shot at getting a largely uninterested
public to take notice of the national humiliation and subsequent
cover-up over the deaths of American diplomats and the sacking of our
consulate in Benghazi. On the other hand, everyone involved in this
sorry excuse for a sex scandal seems to have been too busy e-mailing
each other to have had any sex.
The FBI was initially reported to have
printed out 20,000ā30,000 pages of e-mails and other communications
between General Allen, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Jill Kelley of
Tampa, one-half of a pair of identical twins dressed like understudies
for the CentCom mess-hall production of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
Thirty thousand pages! The complete works of Shakespeare come to about
three and a half thousand pages, but American officials canāt even have a
sex scandal without getting bogged down in the paperwork.
For the cost of running those FBI documents off the photocopier, you
could fly some broad to the Bahamas and have a real sex scandal.
Instead, weāll āinvestigateā it for a year or three, as weāre doing with
Benghazi itself. At her press conference the other day, soon-to-be
Secretary of State Susan Rice explained that she would be misspeaking if
she were to explain why she misspoke about Benghazi until something
called the āAccountability Review Boardā has finished āconducting
investigationsā into āall aspectsā of the investigations being
conducted, which should be completed by roughly midway through Joe
Bidenās second term.
Pending that ādefinitive accounting,ā one or two aspects stand out.
Paula Broadwell had access to General Petraeus because she was
supposedly writing his biography. As it turns out, she canāt write, so
her publisher was obliged to hire a ghostwriter from the Washington Post.
Some years ago, at a low point in my career, I was asked to ghostwrite a
book for a supermodel. Thatās usually the type of āwriterā who requires
a ghost: models, singers, athletes, celebrities. When a first-time
biographer requires a ghostwriter, that person is not a biographer but
something else. Yet she had classified documents at her home ā and yes,
as the president suggested, theyāre probably not that
classified, not the real top-secret stuff. But in a speech at the
University of Denver Mrs. Broadwell appeared to reveal accidentally that
she is privy to operational knowledge of illegal CIA interrogation
chambers in Benghazi.
Now let us move from General Petraeusās mistress to General Allenās
non-mistress, Tampa socialite and identical twin Jill Kelley. Mrs.
Kelley had clearance for all parts of the MacDill Air Base and was given
some kind of commemorative certificate as āhonorary ambassadorā to
CentCom, on the basis of which, in a recent 9-1-1 call, she claimed the
right toādiplomatic protection.ā Yeah, thatās what Chris Stevens
thought in Benghazi. As appears to be well known, the Kelleys have
financial problems and their luxury home faces foreclosure. For a while
they ran a charity, the Doctor Kelley Cancer Foundation, which makes
terminal cancer patientsā final wishes come true. In 2007, they took in
$157,284 in donations, and ran up expenses of $81,927 on dining,
entertainment, and travel. So, if youāve got cancer and your dying wish
is for Jill Kelley to party, this is the charity for you.
In other words, neither of these women pass the smell test. Which is a
problem insofar as Petraeus, as CIA director, is supposed to be head of
the national smell test, and General Allen, as Petraeusās successor in
Kabul, is supposed to be head of the smell test in Afghanistan. In the
Gaza āpeace agreementā signed last week, they flew in Hillary Clinton to
give the impression that she had something to do with it, whereas in
reality she was entirely peripheral to the deal. But Jill Kelley is
apparently essential to anything that matters in CentCom: When Pastor
Terry Jones was threatening to burn a Koran, General Allen asked Mrs.
Kelley to mediate. When radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge was
threatening to ādeep-fat fryā a Koran, General Allen recommended the
mayor of Tampa ask Mrs. Kelley to intervene.
The U.S. government is
responsible for 43 percent of the planetās military spending, and
apparently all that gets you is that, when the feces hits the fan, the
four-star brass start e-mailing Jill Kelley of Tampa. If only sheād been
hosting a champagne reception at the Sigonella air base in southern
Italy, maybe we could have parachuted her into Benghazi to defuse the
situation. Jill is the woman Hillary can only dream of being ā at the
confluence of all the great geostrategic currents of the age. Why didnāt
we fly Jill Kelley to broker the Gaza deal? Instead of a patsy peddling
risible talking points like Susan Rice, why canāt we have Jill Kelley
as secretary of state?
As far as I can tell, our enemies in Afghanistan donāt go in for
Soviet-style honey traps. Which is just as well, considering the ease
with which, say, a pretend biographer can wind up sitting next to the
U.S. commander on his personal Gulfstream. In different ways, Director
Petraeusās judgment and Director Clapperās obtuseness testify to the
problems of Americaās vast, sprawling, over-bureaucratized intelligence
community. If Director Petraeus canāt see the obvious under his nose in
his interventions in the Kelley twinsā various difficulties, why would
you expect Director Clapper to have any greater grasp of whatās
happening in Cairo or Damascus?
