Petreaus resigns

scoutpilot said:
Pespite his mistakes, Petraeus is a leader who has sacrificed mightily to fight and win our nation's wars. The other individual in question has no such credentials to hang his hat on. There is also significant belief that that gentleman used his rank and position to do favors for someone, some of them of the fiscal nature (remains to be seen what the investigation bears).

That, and Petraeus didn't set about turning Beast Barracks into Happy Time Day Camp. Thus I reserve the right to be arbitrary in my condemnation.
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Petraeus actually went to war.
 
scoutpilot said:
Where do you keep the fit ones? In a box in the bustle rack?

Ok, ok...back on topic. I knew you'd bite on that. :thumb:
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you only need them when you have to have someone jump off to cut the concertina wire. until then, you pack them with the M4!
 
MemberLG said:
Ted Kennedy's DUI,
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You left out the dead girl and that Ted Kennedy went back to the party, then to a hotel, where he complained about the noise of a party in the room next to his, and then went back to hang out with his buddies again, until they found out what he had done and told him that he needed to inform authorities.

And then the Kennedy's met, with their trusted advisors, at the "Kennedy compound".

I thought "Ted Kennedy's DUI" was a little light for the murderer.
 
Thanks Scout and TPG

I too wanted to thank Scout and TPG for their insight. I certainly wasn't one to condemn Petraeus for his personal failing here, but you mention a perspective I hadn't even thought of. I think we all are concerned about what the lower ranks experience in war. I don't think many (if any) of us civvies even consider what it might do to the upper echelon. Thanks again.
 
I think Scout and TPG are giving him a bit of a free pass. Yes, MAYBE they've been through some crap in their lives, but their 4-star generals, I'm guessing they haven't seen the combat at the level most soldiers or Marines have.

It does a disservice to the individuals who serve, and don't feel the need to sleep around on their wives.

And I'm not suggesting at all that infidelity doesn't happen across the military, both by service members and by their significant others back home.
 
LineInTheSand said:
I think Scout and TPG are giving him a bit of a free pass. Yes, MAYBE they've been through some crap in their lives, but their 4-star generals, I'm guessing they haven't seen the combat at the level most soldiers or Marines have.

It does a disservice to the individuals who serve, and don't feel the need to sleep around on their wives.

And I'm not suggesting at all that infidelity doesn't happen across the military, both by service members and by their significant others back home.
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You're entitled to your opinion. But I think you missed the point.
 
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buff81 said:
I find it interesting that the ones on here that are less harsh on Petraeus are the military members. Us civilians are the harsher critics. Noone has condoned what he did, but the military folks, while disappointed in Petraeus, seem to have an understanding that the rest of us don't get. So maybe it is best viewed from the inside.
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Most civilian members hold serving military members in high regards - duty, honor, sefless service, personal sacrafices, courage, and etc.

So I can see how civilians can be more harsh on Petraeus as they hold military members in high regards. A difference between a married man having an affair vs a person in a committed relationship seeing another girl.

At least for me, no matter what we do, we are still human beings.
 
scoutpilot said:
You're entitled to your opinion. But I think you missed the point.
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I understand where you were going with it, I just don't agree. There are far too many folks who have done the same or more without doing this.

Now, maybe people believed too much in him. A hero on the battlefield doesn't always equate to the guy you want watching your kids.... nor would you want your babysitter leading troops.

We tend to glorify spies. That's fine, but lets not suggest they're all just great folks doing things for the right reasons. Maybe some are, but they aren't all.

So, I understand what you're saying, but I disagree it has a factor in THIS specific event.
 
Interesting comments by Tom Ricks in ForeignPolicy that I think have a lot of merit to them :
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/13/petraeus_situation_you_asked_i_answer
The sudden departure of General David Petraeus from the CIA probably tells us more about the state of our nation than it does about Petraeus. President Barack Obama should not have accepted his resignation.

We now seem to care more about the sex lives of our leaders than the real lives of our soldiers. We had years of failed generalship in Iraq, for example, yet left those commanders in place. Petraeus' departure again demonstrates we are strict about intimate behavior, but extraordinarily lax about professional incompetence.

Americans severely judge some forms of private behavior between consenting adults, if one party is a public official. Yet we often resist weighing the professional competence of such officials -- even when they clearly are not doing a good job.

This is not, as some say, because we are a puritanical nation. Rather, our standards have changed in recent decades -- and not for the better.
We don't know precisely the relationship between General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his driver, Kay Summersby, during World War II. But it is evident that it was romantic in some ways, and, by her later account, quite intimate. If Ike were judged by today's standard, he would have been sent home in disgrace from Europe, and the war likely would have been worse without his calm, determined and unifying presence. He was not fired. But dozens of other Army officers, including 16 division commanders in combat, were relieved of command during the war -- for professional reasons.

Matthew Ridgway was another great American general, serving in World War II and Korea. Over a few months in 1951, in one of the best but lesser-known episodes of American generalship, Ridgway turned around our fortunes in the Korean War. Like Ike, Ridgway was fond of female companionship. He almost seemed to get a new wife for every war. In his personal papers on file at the U.S. Army archives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, interspersed with discussions of how to improve combat leadership in the Korean War, there are some terse notes from his first wife's lawyer.

This change may have occurred in part because we as a nation no longer have much military experience and no longer prize military effectiveness, nor even are capable of judging it. In past wars, soldiers eager to survive would forgive their leaders a multitude of lapses if they believed those leaders knew their business.

We also may have changed because so few of us have "skin in the game," to use a phrase one often hears from the parents of soldiers. Certainly, if I had a loved one in a combat zone, I would care much more about the military skills of the people in charge than I would about their sexual lives.

Another reason we may also hesitate to judge professional competence is that it is difficult in small, messy, unpopular wars to know just what victory looks like. Yet ironically, in Iraq, Petraeus was one of the few clear successes we had among our top leaders -- first in commanding the 101st Airborne Division Mosul in 2003-04, and then as the overseer of "the surge" that began extricating the United States from Iraq in 2007.

Our diminished standards speak to a lack of seriousness in the way we wage our wars. No, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are not existential, as World War II was. But a soldier blown up in Afghanistan this year is every bit as dead as one machine-gunned on Omaha Beach 68 years ago. Today's soldiers deserve to have the most competent leaders we can provide, just as the men of D-Day did.

Some of my friends in the military argue that a general who cannot keep his marriage vows cannot be trusted to keep his word. But we all fail in different ways throughout life. As Petraeus' revelations last week reminded us, he is human. We have asked much of him, sending him on three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Yet when the time came for us to be generous in return, we were not. I have known Petraeus for about 15 years, and his supposed lover, Paula Broadwell, for a portion of that time. I am not close to either. I do not approve of what they reportedly did. But I also don't think it is any of my business.

By contrast, taking care of our soldiers should be a concern of all of us. Where are our priorities?
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While I tend to agree with all that was written in the artical, Gen. Petraeus had the misfortune as it were, to enter the Lion's den of Politics as the Director of the CIA. This group has been known to eat their young.

I do hope that Gen. Allen keeps his sword firmly in hand, and does not give in to the pressure to fall on it.
 
Well- as Shakespeare had Iago say in Act 2 Scene 3 of Othello:
"More of this matter cannot I report:But men are men; the best sometimes forget":
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too many stones throne from glass houses- which we all occupy. Petraeous should have kept his fly zipped- which I'm sure he knew then as now, and now he's paying a personal and professional price- and unfortunately I think that the US is deprived of a very talented and accomplished man. But those who are too smug in proclaiming their condemnations and by implication their own flawlessness are mistaken. Romans 3 reminds us that: "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God". We all err badly, we all pay a price and we can all be forgiven and redeemed- Gen Petraeous included. So I hope that the country gets past this in short order and puts the General to work in a position where we can again benefit from his ability.
 
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