BIZARRE LOVE PENTAGON

DAVID HOWELL “BETRAYUS” PETRAEUS, former head of what the Americans call the CIA and the Four-Star General overseeing command of US operations in Afghanistan, as well as having been a PhD lecturer teaching International Relations at the United States Military Academy and Fellow of Georgetown University, ought to know that good strategy demands that one should not shit on one’s own doorstep.

 

YET THE GOOD GENERAL APPEARS not to have been aware of the fact that the chattering classes in the press and “on the wires”, as our colonial cousins in intelligence sometimes used to term it when I was involved in counter-espionage, would “dog”, “hound” and “nail” him if he was in a “compromise situation”.

 

IN A WAY THIS SHOWS THAT TRUE LOVE is still alive. Petraeus was apparently doing the naughty with muscular Paula Broadwell, ostensibly his biographer, unbeknown to his wife, in what would perhaps be acceptable behaviour for a military man of importance, somewhat similar to our ruling classes in Britain, where either one shags a girl from among one’s female serving staff or one is considered to be a bit of a wimp by one’s wife. In short, he thought he could get away with this triangle.

 

IN AMERICA, OF COURSE, THIS IS DONE in a more open and light-filled manner, as shown by the most important officer in the American forces throwing away the most successful career in American intelligence since the days of J. Edgar Hoover by getting the occasional sexual relief from a bulging trout-pouted underling in his wood-panelled office.

 

THIS LOVE TRIANGLE AT FIRST widened when Four-Star Marine General John Allen was brought into the mix, as a suspected element knowing that something was amiss after e-mails between him and Floridian socialite Jill Kelley had been revealed, suggesting that the good general, a married man, like Petraeus, and entrusted to upholding “truth, justice and the American way”, was somehow underhand in his activities.

 

THE LOVE PENTAGON WAS MADE COMPLETE as it became five-sided when it became known that Kelley, presumably Allen’s lover, was sending e-mails to Broadwell, now known as Petraeus’s mistress, threatening her and telling her to “stay away from my man”: this presumably being Petraeus, unless we wish this to become a love hexagon. In theory, Allen would become Petraeus’s successor, but common sense suggests that at the highest levels of intelligence activity among the Washington community it would be wiser just to hand over the reins of power to a new breed of highly trained clever young women who are, without wishing to be sexist, ”attractive”. They will not be drawn into pillow talk as easily as men of a certain age whose wives look like yesterday. Who knows where this will end?

BARACK TO THE FUTURE II

WINSTON CHURCHILL MAY HAVE had a point when he stated “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, (although in my opinion he might have added “and wearing military uniform”), but I would perhaps have something similar to state about our former colonial cousins the United States of America. The decision to elect Barack Hussein Obama for a second term reminds me of an example given to me many years ago by a Latin teacher of mine.

 

HAVING BEEN A DOCTOR in the British Army, which was why, I presume, he knew Latin, he presented us with an interesting analogy on the US presidential elections, usually a two-way contest. Imagine, he suggested, a group of one hundred people. About seventy of them are permanently falling ill, or are chronically ill, or were born ill. These people tend to ignore the advice of their doctor (when they bother to consult a doctor) and regularly indulge in behaviour that leads to their conditions getting worse, or at least not better.

 

THE SECOND GROUP is made of super-fit, active and energetic people, of around thirty in number. They live a healthy lifestyle, avoid the things that may be damaging to their health, and are generally prepared for anything that comes at them. When they come down with something, which everyone may do, they have it under control in hours.

 

FOR SOME REASON NEVER EXPLAINED TO ME by my Latin teacher (although I have vague memories of him talking about some ancient medical system in use in Japan), the people in this community have to elect a doctor.

 

COME ELECTION TIME THERE ARE TWO candidates, both promising to “bring good health to everyone”. One of the candidates is from the “sick” group and the other is from the healthy group. The result of the election is that the “chronically sick” doctor wins by a majority of one.

 

MY TEACHER NEVER WENT on to explain the future of the health of those involved under the sick doctor; he merely left it up to us to imagine. One of the things we would have to consider, I suppose, was the number of healthy people who voted for a sick doctor. And this brings me to another famous quotation by Winston Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

START SPREADING THE NEWS

“IT IS AN ILL WIND”, I am told by proverbial tradition, “that blows no one any good”. And perhaps there can have been no event in history to make us more mindful of the truth contained in this statement than the lamentable destruction of a great swathe of the US Eastern Seaboard by the unfortunately-named “Sandy” hurricane that has devastated much of the tri-state coastal area and particularly the city of New York.

 

ALMOST AS IF FORESEEN IN THE LYRICS to the song “New York, New York”, by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, “Sandy” has “done the Sinatra thing” in fulfilling “I want to be a part of it”, and “I want to stray right through the very heart of it” and “I want to wake up in that city that doesn’t sleep”. Indeed many citizens of New York City, I am now seeing, have not been sleeping for a short while. And those of Hoboken, New Jersey, which is in fact the early stomping ground of Francis Albert Sinatra, will not be sleeping in their own beds for quite a while. If they can find them. Thus their “little town blues” will not be “melting away” for a time.

 

THE ADVANTAGE OF THIS, OF COURSE, is that everyone can make a “brand new start of it”, and thus put the US economy back on track through what was always its major source of employment, sales and investment: construction in the North East.

 

THE ILL WIND, HOWEVER, brings political good news to Barack Hussein Obama. Only a week ago the polls and surveys were suggesting that he was fighting for his political life against Romney the Mormon, also a dubious choice for the populace at large, but one who was in the money enough to launch a massive final week charge to the White House based on spreading out dollar largesse.

 

THUS STYMIED, ROMNEY KNOWS NOT HOW, to use the XVII century Mormon language of his mentor Joseph Smith, who was writing in the XIX century in texts that are obviously fake, to advance. His attempt yesterday to hand out five thousand dollars of “candy” to the homeless in a shelter was filmed on live NBC, ABC and Cable stations. When one “homeless” said that candy was no use, that they wanted money, Romney started doling out cash from his own pocket. All interpretations of this on every channel I have watched have stated he was being idiotic and that he is dead in the water.

 

DEAD IN THE WATER, HOWEVER, may apply to many things after “Sandy” has swept across the East coast and been shown nation- and worldwide.

 

OBAMA SUPPORTERS OBVIOUSLY THINK that “Sandy” is a home run. I am not so sure. For 80% of American voters Sandy means nothing. Many had already voted by post. And I am minded of the great 1977 movie “New York, New York”, with Liza Minelli and Robert De Niro. According to the producers, it was “box office gold”. Then the director, Martin Scorcese, changed just one line in the final cut, and turned a cert billion grosser into a turkey. One line at the end of this campaign could do the same.

 

(My photo shows Governor Romney "pissing in the wind" according to Democrats)