Libya all in? Failed Nato mission exposes US generals
Horace G. Campbell
2012-11-21, Issue <
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/606> 606
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http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/85450>
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/85450
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http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/606/paula.jpg
The extramarital affair cited for the resignation of CIA chief Gen Petraeus
is insignificant by far compared to his belonging to a section of US
military and intelligence elite pursuing a complex right-wing global agenda.
Carter Ham has been removed as head of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM).
General Petraeus resigned from the CIA on November 9. Rear Adm. Charles M.
Gaouette was reassigned on October 26 as the commander of the USS John C.
Stennis strike group. These three changes at the top of the US military
establishment are all related to the failed NATO intervention in North
Africa and the subsequent war and killings that have been unleashed by
militias in Libya, especially in Benghazi. These changes exposed the new
autonomy and war fighting capabilities that were being experimented where
the CIA and the leaders of the military command structures such as AFRICOM
and Central Command (CENTCOM) made policy independent of the executive
branch and civilian leadership. This experiment shattered with devastating
consequences for the entire military apparatus ensnaring generals, financial
speculators, media specialists on the military and politicians.
On October 18, 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that
President Obama will nominate General David Rodriguez to succeed General
Carter Ham as commander of U.S. Africa Command. Carter Ham had taken over as
commander of AFRICOM from General William 'Kip' Ward on March 8, 2011 and
had been placed before the international news as the person in charge of the
NATO-led intervention in Libya, when it was assumed that the intervention
would be over in one month. This war dragged on for more than one year, and
a year later, after the NATO forces announced 'success' in Libya, the
battles with the sponsored militias led to the killing of the US Ambassador
to Libya on September 11, 2012. One month after the death of Ambassador
Christopher Stevens and three others, (one State Department high tech
specialist and two CIA operatives) in the US 'facility' in Benghazi, the
internal investigations into the US military response led to the nomination
of General David Rodriquez. If and when David Rodriquez is confirmed by the
US Senate, AFRICOM will have been led by three different commanders in less
than four years.
Two days after Barack Obama was re-elected the President of the United
States, on November 9, it was announced that General David Petraeus, a
retired four-star general and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
was resigning from his position. David H. Petraeus, who had courted the
press and academia to build a reputation as a successful soldier-scholar,
resigned suddenly as C.I.A. director after evidence of an extramarital
affair began to come into the public arena. Inside Washington, the
extramarital affair was an open secret that there was a relationship with
the biographer who had written, All In: The Education of General David
Petraeus. This book was published in January 2012 and when Paula Broadwell
appeared on the Daily Show in January to promote her biography of General
Petraeus, she was full of innuendo so that those who could read the subtext
of her message could discern what she was attempting to communicate. The
corporate media reported that the extramarital affair had been uncovered by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and that it reflected 'poor
judgment' on the part of the general. Between October 18, when the Commander
of Africom was relieved, and November 9, when General Petraeus resigned,
there had been a major effort to present information on Benghazi that would
influence the outcome of the presidential elections of November 6. In
military parlance, this effort of the neo-conservatives to place
responsibility for the Benghazi debacle on the White House would have been a
military information operation. The very close and intimate relationship
between the US media, academia and the military had been refined in the new
war fighting template that had been experimented since the passing of the
Patriot Act and the integration between the media, high tech companies and
robotic unmanned weapons of death, called drones. In this war fighting
template, grand failures such as the complete fiasco in Iraq and the massive
drug war in Afghanistan had been covered up with journalists and academics
serving the interests of one branch of the military. This cover-up has been
buttressed by partisan accounts of the role of differing Generals. The most
recent book, by Thomas Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from
World War II to Today, was one representation of the new embrace between the
media and sections of the military establishment. In that book, numerous
generals were critiqued for their incompetence and lack of vision. Tom Ricks
was joining an argument that many of these Generals should have been fired.
Of General Petraeus, Tom Ricks was full of praise noting that, Petraeus
showed ' real independence of thought ... he is an adaptive general.' In
that book, Petraeus was one with good judgment while others such as Tommy
Franks and General Casey were compared to General William Westmoreland,
poster general of failure in Vietnam.
The double speak and web of sex/intrigue/corruption in the military is now
blown wide open for the world to see where generals such as John Allen,
Commander of the US military in Afghanistan who was supposed to be in the
midst of a war, had time and space to send 20-30,000 pages of email to Jill
Kelley, the woman in Tampa, Florida, who was seen by. General Petraeus's
mistress as a rival for his attentions. Media hype about 'inappropriate
communication' with Jill Kelley cannot divert attention from the realities
of the current state of warfare and insecurity in Libya where over 50,000
have lost their lives, since NATO intervened with the 'responsibility to
protect.'
For the peoples of Libya, the United Nations and the peace community, this
unfolding Petraeus scandal is of particular interest because of the close
relationships between the oil companies, western intelligence/military
agencies and the marauding militias that are now coercing Libyan citizens.
The failure of the counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan had
now come out in Libya. It is All in. When the information about the attack
on the US 'facility' in Benghazi was first brought to light, there had been
confusion. Was the space that was attacked a 'consulate,' a State Department
'facility, 'a CIA safe house, or indeed a prison for captured militias? This
confusion took attention away from the reality that elements in the military
had formulated a policy to align with certain militia groups in Eastern
Libya and that these militias (sometimes called jihadists) had in the past
been linked to groups that the US called 'terrorist organizations.' France,
the CIA, and the AFRICOM had aligned with these jihadists to destabilize
Libya, freeze billions of dollars of assets, execute Gaddafi and kept the
alliance going using Libya as a rear base in the current drive for
regime-change in Syria.
The Republicans had sought to benefit from the confusion and disinformation
that had been spun by the intelligence and the military about what were the
real causes of the death of the ambassador in Benghazi. There had been
hearings called before the Republican-controlled Congress, the State
Department issued statements, the CIA issued a timeline of the events in
Benghazi on the night of September 11 and the conservative media sought to
politicise the events to present a picture of incompetence on the part of
the Obamas Administration. With every press release and timeline that was
presented there was information that posed new questions about the rot and
web of corruption of the US military. After General David Petraeus resigned,
it was reported in the US press that he had travelled to Libya at the end of
October to carry out his own investigation (some would say cover-up). No
sooner had this information came out than it was revealed that the CIA had
been holding Libyan militias as prisoners in the CIA annex in Benghazi. This
information, which was delivered by Paula Broadwell in a speech before the
University of Denver on October 26, deepened the intrigue about what was
going on in Libya.
Petraeus had been the commander of the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan at
a moment in the history of the United States when military information
operations were as important as weapons. According to the US military
doctrine in this new kind of warfare there had been the struggle to control
the narrative. The US military could never control the narrative on Africa
because the history of white supremacy and chauvinism precluded a clear
understanding of the dynamics of self-determination in Africa. In the ten
years of the absolute failures of the US military operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan, this effort to control the narrative had involved a massive
disinformation campaign against US citizens. In the specific case of Libya,
the corporate media had presented the 'end of the war' as a victory for the
forces of NATO. The truth was never divulged that there is still fighting
going on in Libya with the most recent battles at Bani Walid an explicit
statement on the ongoing war.
This 'successful' NATO intervention had been sold as the narrative until the
death of Ambassador Stevens unfolded the layered nature of the war. Between
the removal of General Carter Ham and the resignation of General Petraeus
there had been the replacement of Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette as the
commander of the USS John C. Stennis strike group. The full back story
relating to Petraeus and Libya is still unfolding, but for this week we want
to focus on how structures, such as the US Africa command, sought to
function in a world as if the Command was a parallel government with its own
access to AID resources, financing, health providers, private military
contractors, and access to aircraft carrier strike groups such as the John
Stennis. This was a military and intelligence integration, independent of
the executive that was out of control and establishing policy.
Carter Ham selected by the Crusaders in the US military
When the U.S. Africa Command was launched in October 2007, William E. 'Kip'
Ward, a United States Army four-star general, served as Commander from
October 1, 2007 to March 8, 2011. General Ward, an African American, was
demoted to a three-star Lieutenant General, and is now scheduled for
retirement. Lt. General William Ward had been quickly removed from AFRICOM
after the passing of Resolution 1970 in February 2011 when the NATO top
brass and the U.S. intelligence agencies knew of the plot against the people
of Libya which was to be routed through AFRICOM. As an African American Ward
had developed very close relationships with African generals and
politicians, even those who had been publicly opposing the US AFRICOM. Ward
had been removed and demoted on the charge that he had spent excessive
amounts of money allowing his family members to fly on government planes.
Here was an officer who had been flying with his wife and family, disgraced
by the army high command at the same moment while General Petraeus was
exhibiting 'poor judgment' with Paula Broadwell. In November 2012, General
William 'Kip' Ward was stripped of one of his four stars for misuse of
military funds when he was head of the US Africa command. He was also
ordered to repay $82,000.
General Carter Ham had been confirmed by the US Senate in November 2010 to
become the next Commander of U.S. Africa Command but the revolutionary
upsurge in Tunisia and Egypt hastened the emplacement of General Ham and he
assumed the post on March 8, 2011. At that moment, the US military had been
divided between those who I termed the Rocks and the Crusaders. See 'US
Military and Africom: Between the rocks and the crusaders.' Pambazuka News,
March 31, 2011 <
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72174>
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72174
In that article I had argued that the new head of the US Africa Command was
based on the selection by the Crusaders. The term Crusaders first appeared
for a wider audience beyond the peace and social justice forces when Seymour
Hersh used the term in an article in Foreign Policy Magazine. Then Seymour
Hersh revealed that there was a faction of the US military known as
'Crusaders, that had taken over the army.' Hersh asserted that these
Crusaders were bent on intensifying a war against Islam, and viewed
themselves as protectors of Christianity. According to the article, Hersh
maintained that these neoconservative elements dominate the top echelons of
the US military, including figures such as former commander of US forces in
Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal and Vice Admiral William McRaven.
Hersh said, 'What I'm really talking about is how eight or nine
neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government.
Took it over.'
In May 2009, four months after the inauguration of President Barack Obama,
Harper's magazine carried a lengthy report that placed General David
Petraeus at the heart of the Crusaders. The magazine carried a very detailed
article on the role of the Crusaders in the military, entitled, 'Evangelical
Proselytization Still Rampant in U.S. Military.' In this article we are
alerted to the numerous fronts of the Crusaders. The information in the
magazine article discussed a book published in 2005 by Lieutenant Colonel
William McCoy, titled Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military
Personnel. According to the article this book outlined an 'anti-Christian
bias' in the US, and sought to counter it by making the case for the
'necessity of Christianity for a properly functioning military.' McCoy's
book was endorsed by General David Petraeus, who said: 'Under Orders should
be in every rucksack for those moments when soldiers need spiritual energy.'
The war in Libya gave the Crusaders the opportunity to destroy a stable
society in North Africa and unleashed 1,700 militias in the society. Not
only did the Libyan invasion enable the Crusaders an opportunity to create
havoc, but it placed great strains within Africa with the fallout from Libya
unleashing instability all across northwest Africa. Carter Ham had been
handed the responsibility to be the commander in the US Africa Command after
Gen. Stanley McChrystal had been sacked. Petraeus was nurturing the media
and academics to realize his ambitions and we now know that the arrogance
and haughtiness of Petraeus ensured a high tolerance for ideas of European
exceptionalism and the innate superiority of US citizens of European
descent.
The US Africa Command deepened the strategic concepts of General Petraeus to
mobilize 'dark' forces to fight wars. This was based on the mobilization of
financial resources and personnel outside the formal structures of the US
military with the heavy use of the Central Intelligence Agency and Private
Military Contractors. Nick Turse has chronicled this new direction in the
planning and fighting plan of the military establishment in the book, The
Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret
Bases, and Cyberwarfare, (Haymarket Books, 2012). Earlier this year Turse
was been involved in a debate with Col Davis of AFRICOM over whether the US
military presence was growing very fast in Africa. See 'Fast-growing U.S.
military presence in Africa.' The debate with director of the U.S. Africa
Command Office of Public Affairs, disputing in some detail a number of
Turse's points, illustrated just how sensitive the AFRICOM bureaucracy had
become about the new forms of warfare with proxy fighters, special ops and
drones. (See basic debate <
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175574/>
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175574/
General Petraeus found the perfect space to set up an alternative
military/intelligence policy-making unit when he requested that he be placed
as head of the Central Intelligence Agency when he sought to flee the web of
drugs and corruption in Afghanistan in 2011. According to the New York
Times, Petraeus had blurred the lines between spies and soldiers in secret
missions abroad.
'The appointments of General Petraeus and Mr. Panetta were the latest
evidence of a significant shift over the past decade in how the United
States fights its battles - the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies
in secret American missions abroad. .. General Petraeus aggressively pushed
the military deeper into the C.I.A.'s turf, using Special Operations troops
and private security contractors to conduct secret intelligence missions. As
commander of the United States Central Command in September 2009, he also
signed a classified order authorizing American Special Operations troops to
collect intelligence in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran and other places outside
of traditional war zones.' See <
http://tinyurl.com/c8olk9f>
http://tinyurl.com/c8olk9f
CARTER HAM FIRED OVER BENGHAZI
It was the alliance of the Crusaders that had ensnared the State Department
and the US diplomatic forces in the war in Libya. Ambassador Stevens had
become a cheerleader for this cooperation between Special Operations Command
and private military contractors. Christopher Stevens had left his position
in the embassy in Tripoli in February 2011 to coordinate this kind of
warfare in Benghazi. When NATO declared victory in October 2011, Christopher
Stevens was selected as ambassador to Libya and by May 2012 he was back in
Libya. However, the principal base for the Special Ops and private security
intrigue was in Benghazi where the CIA was running a base for the
recruitment of 'extremists' to fight in Syria. Stevens was caught in a
battle between militias and the CIA. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens,
information management officer Sean Smith and CIA agents Tyrone Woods and
Glen Doherty were killed in the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11-12. When the
news was first reported, Woods and Doherty had been identified as private
Security contractors in order to divert attention away from the CIA in the
Benghazi battle.
Sean Smith, the information manager of the State Department, was a symbol of
the geeks who had been mobilized for the new kind of military posture of the
United States. After his passing there was mourning in the wired community.
According to the New York Times, 'Mr. Smith was an avid player of an online
multiplayer game called Eve Online, in which hundreds of thousands of
participants across the globe took on roles like pirates or diplomats in a
science fiction setting. Mr. Smith's online name was 'vile rat.' His
experience was indicative of how the US military had mobilized Smith's
experience in both real and virtual worlds. Coded messages were shared in
this virtual world to serve the interests of the military intelligence
forces that were operating outside of the policy framework of the
government.
Sean Smith has been called a maven by his fellow gamers who have been
mourning his passing. Drawing from the book by Malcolm Gladwell on The
Tipping point, Smith was compared to those mavens or connectors who are
'information specialists', or 'people we rely upon to connect us with new
information.' These mavens or connectors had become crucial for the new
forms of warfare where the lines between the virtual war and real wars are
blurred. Increasingly, the gamers draw extensively from real situations so
that many of the video games are actual simulations of possible battle
scenarios. The conservative militarists who conceive the masculinist forms
of entertainment only recently brought out Call of Duty: Black Ops II that
featured a computer animated David Petraeus as Secretary of Defense.
Sean Smith found out tragically that real war is not a game.
From the books of Bob Woodward we do know that former General Jack Keane
(now of the Board of the Institute for the Study of War) is one of the most
energetic forces aligned with the Petraeus wing of the military/intelligence
establishment. The fact that Jack Keane came forward as the chief explainer
for the National Public Radio (NPR), about the CIA timeline of the events in
Benghazi (where Sean Smith and Christopher Stevens) died gave away the fact
that Petraeus was heavily involved in the events of September 11/12 , 2012.
<
http://m.npr.org/news/World/164207549>
http://m.npr.org/news/World/164207549
It was in this interview on November 2 that Jack Keane told the world of the
decision of General Carter Ham to ask for the National Mission Response
Force to be deployed to Benghazi. The NMRF is a classified force based on
the East Coast of the United States, 24/7 on alert, the shortest alert
string we have to go anyplace in the world. In this interview Keane told the
US public,
'Now, those were ground forces and there were no other forces that were
available and that's why he had to request forces from outside of AFRICOM's
command and control. General Ham also requested a similar force that is part
of the European command that - this is a classified force, special
operations again. They were in central Europe training. They moved them to a
base, got them equipped for combat and moved them to Sigonella. And when
they arrived there, they also were told that the CIA annex had been
evacuated. The problem we have is AFRICOM has no assigned forces stationed
in anywhere near Libya. So we had to depend - he had to depend on alerting
forces to come from the continent of Europe and the continent of North
America to participate in a firefight.'
This information on the deployment of forces by the Commander of AFRICOM was
veiled but there is enough in the interview to grasp the fact that Carter
Ham was drawn into a battle which the US Africa Command was not equipped
for. When the Pentagon carried out its investigation about what happened in
Benghazi, Carter Ham was relieved of his post as commander of AFRICOM. He
had not served the usual three years. General Petraeus journeyed to Libya
after Carter Ham was relieved of his post hoping to save his reputation and
the forms of warfare and destruction that he had refined.
RISE AND FALL OF PETRAEUS: MAKING BENGHAZI AN ELECTION ISSUE
General Petraeus had been an ambitious officer from the US military who had
achieved international notoriety based on how he harnessed the resources of
the media to burnish his image. Petraeus was known as an ambitious officer
from the time that he was at West Point when he grasped that marrying the
daughter of the superintendent of the WestPoint military academy would
enhance his career. Holly Knowlton was from a historical military family in
the USA whose father Gen. William A. Knowlton had been serving as head of
West Point military academy when Petraeus was a cadet. Petraeus graduated in
1974 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. , and two months
before his graduation, he married Holly. Petraeus fancied himself as a
soldier scholar so he pursued advanced degrees at Princeton writing a
doctoral dissertation on 'The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.'
Petraeus became adept at mobilizing academics, especially social scientists,
to abet his 'ambitions.' It was the relationship with one such publicist
that brought out the full extent of the ambitious maneuvering of General
Petraeus. Inside the US military, Petraeus had been known by the traditional
officers as one who would do anything to 'advance' his career. His close
relationship with George W. Bush and the 'success' of the surge in Iraq now
stands as part of his reputation. Petraeus was a figure of disunity within
the military, especially because of his close relationship to the
neoconservatives. One retired officer posed the question in this way, 'Was
General David Petraeus the heroic figure his press releases suggested or a
piece of fiction created, packaged and presented to the American people by
the Bush Administration and its Neocon allies in the media and academia as
the poster boy for counterinsurgency? (See Col. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR, Ret., The
Petraeus Saga: Epitaph for a Four Star,
<
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/14/epitaph-for-a-four-star/%29>
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/14/epitaph-for-a-four-star/)
The full history of General David Petraeus is now in full display but what
is not widely known is how he was really a work of fiction created, packaged
and promoted to the American people. Most citizens in the United States are
not aware of the immense suffering imposed on the peoples of Iraq based on
the 'surge' of General Petraeus. Inside the military there had been great
differences among the officer corps and efforts to understand the
experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq led to the publication of the major
study entitled Decade of War. The Joint Staff study of the post-9/11 wars
had been an effort by the military to understand why the US military had
been a failure caught in the quagmire of corruption and drug wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
There had been no shortage of scholarly texts that had explored in great
detail how the United States corrupted Afghanistan. One writer from the
Washington Post was explicit when he wrote, 'Afghan corruption, and how the
U.S. facilitates it,':
'It is time that we as Americans - in government, in the media, and as
analysts and academics - took a hard look at the causes of corruption in
Afghanistan. The fact is that we are at least as much to blame for what has
happened as the Afghans, and we have been grindingly slow to either admit
our efforts or correct them.' <
http://tinyurl.com/befw7p5>
http://tinyurl.com/befw7p5
Other established military specialists such as Anthony Cordesman had written
extensively on theft and waste in Afghanistan. It was left to the peace
writers such as Alfred McKoy to write on 'Can Anyone Pacify the World's
Number One Narco-State? The Opium Wars in Afghanistan.'
<
http://tinyurl.com/yzmuu8q>
http://tinyurl.com/yzmuu8q
While the name of Petraeus did not explicitly surface in these reports on
drugs and corruption, his high profile as the top commander in Afghanistan
and as head of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) brought a focus on him. As
an adept manipulator of the media in the refinement of Military Information
Operations, Petraeus nurtured the press and one of the clearest expression
can be found in the new book, by Thomas Ricks, The Generals: American
Military Command From World War II to Today. In this book, generals such as
Tommy Franks were assailed in the same vein as Petraeus was venerated.
Petraeus was mobilizing the same fawning relationship with Paula Broadwell.
Petraeus had met Broadwell in 2006 while she was operating between US
military intelligence and Harvard, but this relationship could not be
deepened until after the passing of Gen. William A. Knowlton in 2008.
GENERAL PETRAEUS AND THE DISRESPECT FOR BARACK OBAMA
Petraeus had endeared himself to neocons and the Christian fundamentalists
as a good example of the West Point's Cadet Honor Code. The Honor Code reads
simply that, 'A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.'
Because of his endorsement of Lieutenant Colonel William McCoy's Under
Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel, Petraeus was on the
radar of the right. It is not by accident that of the top politicians
calling Petraeus at this time was George W. Bush. Bob Woodward in his book
Obama's Wars documented facts of the disrespect exhibited from a section of
the military (Crusaders) to Obama. It is important for readers to grasp the
deep arrogance of Petraeus in relation to Obama. Much of this has come out
in the formulation that Petraeus attempted to 'box in' the president over
the deployment of troops to Afghanistan. Bob Woodward has recounted for
history the back and forth between Obama and Petraeus and General Stanley A.
McChrystal. Stanly Mc Chrystal had engineered his exit from the corruption
of Afghanistan by making explicit comments about Obama which he knew would
get him out of the opium war in Afghanistan.
Barack Obama immediately appointed General Petraeus to this position as
Commander in Afghanistan. Petraeus understood the stakes of the legacy of
generals and it was based on his sense of history that he supported the
project of Paula Broadwell to write his biography. Douglas MacGregor
described the two in this way, 'Broadwell and Petraeus were simply two
people with converging agendas.'
Between the biography of Broadwell and the book of Thomas Ricks, Petraeus
was of the view that his historical legacy was secure. Inside the military
there had been a major debate among the officer corps on whether officers
such as Petraeus should be held accountable. Lt. Col. Paul Yingling had
written a widely discussed article in the Armed Forces Journal, 'A failure
in generalship.' With the Crusaders taking over the military, officers who
followed the line of Petraeus were looked upon favourably.
According to the profile of Petraeus by the New York Times, 'Mr. Petraeus
had been the most prominent American military commander over the past
decade, the architect of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq. He stepped into Gen.
Colin L. Powell's shoes as the face of the military, and became a figure
extolled on both sides of Washington's partisan divide.' The New York Times
was fully aware of the divide between the Rocks and the Crusaders and how
Obama had relied on Colin Powell to rally the Rocks to checkmate the
Crusaders.
We now know that the Obama team was not complacent as the activities of
General Petraeus were being monitored. Top operatives in the administration
had kept an eye on the presidential ambitions of Petraeus and Petraeus had
assured Rahm Emmanuel that he was not planning to run for president in 2012.
In the supportive profile of General Petraeus provided by the New York Times
we are told,
'Ms. Broadwell became a fixture around the Kabul headquarters of the
American-led coalition in Afghanistan soon after General Petraeus assumed
command in June 2010. She was seen as ambitious and as a striver who aimed
to join Washington's national security elite, and she drew resentment from
officers for playing up her connection to their boss.'
Six months after General Petraeus assumed command in Kabul and was mentoring
his biographer the administration appointed Holly Knowlton Petraeus as an
assistant director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, charged
with advocating on behalf of service members and their families. History
will later reveal the extent of the contacts between Michele Obama and Holly
Knowlton at a moment when insiders in Washington understood fully the
innuendos of Paula Broadwell when she had appeared on the Daily Show.
BENGHAZI AND LIBYA BECOME AN ELECTION ISSUE
Weeks after the battles between the competing militias in Benghazi that
claimed the lives of the CIA operations and the US ambassador, sections of
the US media sympathetic to the Crusaders 'seized on a series of reports by
conservative media outlets to make the incendiary charge shortly before the
election that four Americans had died because of the administration's
negligence.'
General Petraeus said nothing publicly, but from the reports in the media
and from his quick trip to Libya, it was manifest that there was a big
project of damage limitation. Sections of the Conservative media had been so
secure that the narrative of the adminstration's negligence had taken hold
that William Kristol, the conservative editor of The Weekly Standard,
concluded that the agency was pointing its finger at the White House, which
he suggested must have refused the requested intervention. 'Petraeus Throws
Obama Under the Bus' was the headline on the Weekly Standard's blog.
With the timeline of the Benghazi incident presented by the CIA, the blog of
William Kristol and the spin presented to National Public Radio by Jack
Keane, there was only one more event that would protect General Petraeus
from being exposed completely. This was the elections on November 6, 2012.
Benghazi and Libya did not become the issue in the election in the way that
the Conservatives and Crusaders had hoped. The alliance of peace and justice
forces re-elected Barack Obama on November 6. Two days after the re-election
Petraeus resigned.
We are told by the media that the first time the president learnt of the
investigation of the relationship between Paula Broadwell and David Petraeus
was on Thursday November 8 when Petraeus offered his resignation. How would
Eric Cantor know the full details of the Broadwell/Petraeus saga while the
President did not know? Press reports are that the Attorney General Eric
Holder had been notified as far back as the summer. It defies credibility to
read that Barack Obama did not know of the FBI probe of General David
Petraeus,
'White House officials said they were informed on Wednesday night that Mr.
Petraeus was considering resigning because of an extramarital affair. On
Thursday morning, just before a staff meeting at the White House, President
Obama was told. That afternoon, Mr. Petraeus went to see him and informed
him that he strongly believed he had to resign. Mr. Obama did not accept his
resignation right away, but on Friday, he called Mr. Petraeus and accepted
it.'
Military historians will, however, understand why the President of the
United States had to sleep on the decision to accept the resignation of the
most renowned general in the United States. After all, the influence of
Petraeus among journalists and the Crusaders was well known. Petraeus had
served as Commanding General of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the U.S. Army
Combined Arms Center (CAC) located there. As commander of CAC, Petraeus had
been responsible for oversight of the Command and General Staff College and
17 other schools, centers, and training programs as well as for developing
the Army's doctrinal manuals, training the Army's officers, and supervising
the Army's center for the collection and dissemination of lessons learned.
'During his time at CAC, Petraeus and Marine Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
jointly oversaw the publication of Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency, the
body of which was written by an extraordinarily diverse group of military
officers, academics, human rights advocates, and journalists who had been
assembled by Petraeus and Mattis.'
This writer will maintain the healthy skepticism that Obama's decision to
withhold the acceptance of the resignation of Petraeus was based on the
calculated step by step approach with the military that had been adopted
since 2009. This writer will also withhold judgement on the recent effusive
praise of Obama for Petraeus at his press conference on November 14,2012.
There were many serving Generals who were linked militarily and socially to
General Petraeus and the fallout of the web of Petraeus is now becoming more
known. The information that the top commander in Afghanistan, John Allen,
had 'inappropriate communication' with Jill Kelly, with 20-30,000 pages of
email has only served to entice citizens in relation to the unfolding story.
What is of importance is that John Allen followed the military doctrines of
Petraeus in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even more significantly, is the fact that
Allen was a supporter of the new Counterinsurgency form of destabilization
that involved private military contractors.
LIBYAN WAR AND THE NEED TO DISBAND PRIVATE MILITARY CONTRACTORS
The Petraeus affair has served to focus on the salacious details of the
extra-marital affair of General Petraeus overlooking the more fundamental
question of the forms of military destruction that have been unleashed on
Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya. Within the US military establishment there
had been a raging debate on whether generals should be accountable to
civilian leadership. The resignation of General Petraeus, the removal of
Carter Ham of Africa Command and the redeployment of Rear Adm. Charles M.
Gaouette have now brought back the question of civilian control over the
military. Despite the new book by Tom Ricks that had been crafted to save
the reputation of Petraeus and the biography which was supposed to place
Petraeus on the same platform as historic US generals, the new forms of
unchecked warfare brought down the top officers of the COIN strategy of
Petraeus and the Crusaders.
Within a democratic society, the military is supposed to provide advice to
military leaders and military officers are not supposed to deploy troops to
engage with militias without the authorization of the civilian leadership.
The NATO intervention in Libya and the subsequent CIA base in Benghazi had
been an expensive experiment in new forms of warfare that brought about
destruction and the deaths of thousands. After the information on CIA
detention centers during the war in Iraq there had been an outcry about CIA
private prisons. There are citizens in Libya who can come forward to get out
the truth about the charges of Paula Broadwell that the CIA was holding
prisoners in its 'facility' in Libya.
US foreign policy makers had resisted the call by sections of the United
Nations Security Council for a review of the NATO military operations in
Libya. Through the United Nations Human Rights Council there has been a
major effort by peace activists from the global south to bring private
military contractors under international oversight. The Human Rights Council
has established an 'open-ended intergovernmental working group to consider
the possibility of elaborating an international regulatory framework on the
regulation, monitoring and oversight of the activities of private military
and security companies.' <
http://tinyurl.com/cubkbwl>
http://tinyurl.com/cubkbwl
The United States and Britain took the lead in opposing oversight of private
military contractors. Commanders of CENTCOM and AFRICOM have operated over
the past five years as if they were running parallel government. The war on
terror had inspired the intellectual climate on counter-terror and the
rationale for the bureaucratic structure of the unified command which
enabled the military to also be a source of 'independent' policy creation.
There was no oversight when the military budget placed unlimited resources
under the control of military commanders. Why would the US AFRICOM dig wells
in East Africa or hand out school books? These activities were all part of
the public relations exercise to plant the idea that the US Africa Command
was doing humanitarian work in Africa. The confirmation hearings for General
Rodriquez will provide another opportunity to expose the CIA/Africom failure
in Libya. It is well publicized by African scholars that the US Africa
command has been deployed as an auxiliary force to protect US oil companies.
In this protection game, there had been some sections of the top military
apparatus who ventured to state explicitly that the role of Africom was
supposed to check Chinese influence in Africa. General Petraeus had
aggressively pushed the military deeper into the C.I.A.'s turf, using
Special Operations troops and private security contractors to conduct secret
intelligence missions and for fighting. As commander of the United States
Central Command Petraeus had refined the trick of fighting with one group
and then turning against them later. This double-cross game was taking hold
in Libya in order to set back peace and reconstruction in Libya for decades
so that Libya would morph into another Somalia.
With the millions of dollars available for suborning journalists and
academics and with the complicit media, the narrative about the success of
AFRICOM had been widely sold within the United States. It is this attempt to
control the narrative that had led to the widespread view in the United
States that the NATO operation in Libya was a success. The death of
Ambassador Stevens shattered this myth. The firing of Carter Ham uncovered
the ways in which the CIA and sections of the military were making decisions
running policy independent of the civilian leadership.
When one connects the financial dots between CIA front companies such as IN
-Q-Tel, oil companies and oil producers, one can see that global capital is
also a partner with the military industrial complex and the need for
perpetual war on terrorism. That is the circle which must be broken by those
who seek peace.
Petraeus and his supporters had been confident that the circle of war and
destruction would continue for generations. With the support of the media
Petraeus had been confident that the full details of the destruction in
Libya and alliance with the militias could be kept out of the public domain.
The full story is unfolding. The peace and justice forces must intensify the
call for the disbandment of the US Africa Command. Africa needs cooperation
and support for reconstruction. Libya needs the support of the entire
international community to rein in the militias and to rebuild the society.
It is time for the peace movement to refocus on the real activities of
Petraeus, not on the so called extramarital affair. In fact, some
commentators in Europe have commented that in Europe some generals place
such information on the gossip circuit to enhance their reputation. The
peace and justice forces need to focus on the interconnections between the
departure of Petraeus, Carter Ham and Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette.
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Received on Wed Nov 21 2012 - 18:12:59 EST
