Klein, one of the alleged good guys, is a product of our culture of lickspittle. The piece at Bloomberg was as self-serving as they come, another essay to get on “most e-mailed” and read lists, as what happens with anyone who is in the small circle of anointed opinion-makers.
For his piece Klein went to the trouble of digging up Ken Pollack, a discredited national security expert whose book, The Threatening Storm, was used by the Bush administration as part of its global p.r. push (and I do mean global) for the Iraq War. Pollack, Klein told readers, had influenced his opinion on the necessity for war with Iraq. Klein had been a supporter and this week he is sorry for that.
Ken Pollack, as a Brookings Institution scholar, appeared in the news over ten years ago hundreds, if not thousands, of times. He was on television, he was on radio, he was on the Internet. His book was a best-seller. Pollack was as close to being a public figure and celebrity as someone from the Brookings Institution can get.
By 2007, The Threatening Storm was selling for 37 cents used on Amazon. Today it’s worth a penny a copy.
What I haven’t seen are any excerpts of how maddening and rotten news stories and opinions are from that time. Ezra Klein, for example, didn’t get into the horrendous reinforcing and congratulatory press on Pollack’s work. He didn’t republish anything of the quality that makes one gag.
Pollack argues his case well, going beyond the vituperative pronouncements of the administration to link operational objectives to national strategy, but he does not spend much time on the reconstruction of the country, which is, after all, the reason for invasion in the first place. He does make two noteworthy points, however: the removal of Saddam would allow for withdrawal of most of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region; and second, with its wealth in oil, Iraq can pay for its own reconstruction. Naturally, there are advantages and disadvantages to each option, and critics abound, but for Pollack the question is “not whether [we invade], but when.” — from a review of the man’s best-selling book in the Naval War College Review, Autumn 2002
You can tell a lot by the books people read, especially when the readers are members of Congress making life and death decisions about a war.
Winston Churchill is big on Capitol Hill, among both Democrats and Republicans. So is Kenneth Pollack’s new book, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,” whose title is derived from Churchill’s “The Gathering Storm.”
Not on the must-read list are books like Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down,” a harrowing account of just how grim urban street fights can get, even for today’s most elite forces. Nor, judging by interviews and the buzz on Capitol Hill, is there a surge of interest in “hearts and minds” books on Arab history or the culture of radical Islam. — The Christian Science Monitor, December 2002
Sean Penn needs to read [Ken Pollack’s] book. So do Mike Farrell, George Clooney and all the protesters who marched and chanted against an American-led war on Iraq in cities across the world last weekend. — The New York Observer, January 2003
“Saddam has taken the entire Iraqi [WMD] program on the road,” said Iraq expert and former National Security Council official Kenneth Pollack in his recent best-selling book, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” — subsequently repeated thousands of times, like an incantation to ward off common sense, in the Scripps Howard newswire, February 2003
Given Saddam Hussein’s current behavior, his track record, his aspirations and his terrifying beliefs about the utility of nuclear weapons, it would be reckless for us to assume that he can be deterred. Yes, we must weigh the costs of a war with Iraq today, but on the other side of the balance we must place the cost of a war with a nuclear-armed Iraq tomorrow. — Pollack, on Hussein’s alleged WMD program and the reason for war, in the New York Times opinion page, February 2003. One bets they wish they hadn’t done that now.
Despite its human and financial cost (which [Ken Pollack] says could be less than we think even as we prepare for the worst), we are the only ones who can prevent the world from facing a nuclear-armed Hussein. It’s in our interest; it is our duty. — Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, 2002
While the anti-war forces are derided, the media have turned pro-war intellectuals into stars. Each time you look up, you find another interview with Kenneth Pollack, the ex–CIA analyst whose book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq is the bible of war supporters. — LA Weekly, February 28, 2003
While Iraqis “danced in the streets of Baghdad” in DC the “jibes were out for the naysayers who had feared a grueling and protracted conflict” to oust Saddam Hussein. VP Cheney called the war “one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever conducted” and “praised the ‘carefully drawn plan.'” Cheney “was riding high” “as one of an elite corps of political prophets who had accurately forecast a quick collapse” of Saddam’s regime. Cheney insisted that the war “would last ‘weeks, not months.'” Others who predicted a short and decisive victory included Sec/Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Dep. Sec/Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Defense policy analyst Richard Perle, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), ex-CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, and ex-Reagan admin. official Kenneth Adelman (Efron, Los Angeles Times) — Bragging Rights for Iraq, The National Journal, April 2003
“It’s looking like in truth the Iraqi (weapons) program was gray. The Bush administration was trying to say it was black,” said former CIA Iraq expert Kenneth Pollack, now at the Brookings Institution, a research center.
Pollack, who advocated a war to overthrow Saddam, said he believes more evidence of Iraqi weapons activity will be found. — Knight-Ridder newspapers, June 2003
The Bush administration-funded worldwide book blitz.
Even as President Bush delivered his pivotal speech on September 12th to the United Nations regarding the conduct of Hussein’s regime, we noted there was a very timely book launched at the same time by Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institute called, “The Threatening Storm.” We contacted Mr. Pollack and asked him if he would interrupt his book tour, which was not that easy to persuade him to do, and he agreed and went on a number of digital video conferences and visits to countries as far spread as France, Austria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, and now he’s scheduled for South Africa and he’s agreed to do a series more. He’s that third voice, and he is speaking about the cases, pro and con, of invading Iraq in a more reasoned and reasonable way than most people could, and he has another voice to offer. — Undersecretary of State Charlotte Beers, at the National Press Club, December 2002
At a press briefing Dec. 18, State Dept. public diplomacy topper Charlotte Beers announced that her division has asked author Ken Pollack to interrupt a book tour and travel overseas to talk about his book “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.”
Turns out the State Dept. also has been courting foreign journalists over the past year.
“We set up many more responsive facilities than we’ve had in the past for the foreign press at the president’s ranch in Texas, at the White House and in our own State foreign press centers, which are Washington, New York and Los Angeles,” Beers said.
Storytelling stressed
A former Madison Avenue exec, Beers extolled the importance of “storytelling” in convincing overseas ads that the U.S. is only trying to do good. — Daily Variety, December 2002
In fact, one of the reasons to go to war with Iraq sooner, rather than later, is so that we never find ourselves in that position where Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons and we have to risk the obliteration of Riyadh, or Kuwait, and the Saudi oil fields, or Amman, or any of the other capitals of the region that we would worry so much about. Or, for that matter, New York. If the Iraqi’s decided to put a nuclear weapon on a freighter, they could just drive it into New York Harbor and have the same effect there. — Pollack, State Department-sponsored worldwide video conference, two weeks before war
In hitting American forces with chemical weapons, Saddam would exact vengeance, said Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst now with Brookings. He also might hope to delay them from entering the city. — Course of Baghdad Battle Hinges on Unknowns, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 2003
“Unlike so many Iraqi oppositionists, [Ahmed Chalabi] actually does what he says he’s going to do,” says Ken Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. — from an article that should have been entitled, “Ahmed Chalabi — A Great Guy!” by Sally Quinn, the Washington Post, November 2003
“I think that we will find the [WMD] stuff,” Ken Pollack said. “I think it’s simply a matter of time, but I think that we will find, at the very least, the production capability.” — in another State Department-funded worldwide videoconference with Ken Pollack, one entitled “Dr. Wrong, Once Again and With Passion,” May 2003
In a New York Times op-ed piece, Brookings Institution analyst Ken Pollack writes “the search for Iraq’s nonconventional weapons program has only just begun. In the meantime, accusations are mounting that the Bush administration made up the whole Iraqi weapons threat to justify an invasion. That is just not the case – American and its allies had plenty of evidence before the war, and before President Bush took office, indicating that Iraq was retaining its illegal weapons program” — Pollack in the NYT via the National Journal, June 2003
In a world that valued logic and scholarly thought, Ken Pollack would have been run off the reservation a long time ago. This isn’t that world.
Americans no longer have any idea who Ken Pollack is. But that shouldn’t stop you from reading these excerpts or recommending the DD blog post to others.
It’s helpful to again have a look at the manipulated groupthink and how hard to stomach it is.
Ken Pollack, then. Once a very important person, now a nobody and a fraud, still a symbol for our time.
I don’t have much to say for the anniversary week of the Iraq War. For 99 percent of America it’s been all downhill ever since, including me.
The GWB administration and the mainstream media broke everything.
No news agency ever really recovered from the role played in supporting the frauds of the American government. They’re worse now in that they’ve almost entirely given up on doing any critical reporting on national security issues.
As I’ve written recently, almost all the people I knew who actually did opposition work either quit or blew away in the intervening period. Being on the outside got old, people got old. I got old.
Klein admits he was a flack for the war as a college student and believed the say-so of a man almost no Americans can remember, Ken Pollack, a “liberal hawk” who had written a book that became a bestseller for the cause of war.
Pollack’s Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq sells sells for a penny a copy, used. The third party sellers make their small profit on charging you a bit extra for mailing.
Because he’s aggrieved Klein spends an overlong column digging up Pollack for an interview. The only good part, one Klein doesn’t mention, is that Pollack and his colleague, Michael O’Hanlon, another now infamous think-tank “expert” ubiquitous in the news before the tanks rolled, did suffer as a result of the Iraq debacle.
While they remained in the “community” of national security experts, they were thoroughly discredited. The only other person this happened to was Judy Miller of the New York Times who was run out of the profession for the frauds on Saddam’s alleged WMDs published in that newspaper.
Klein wants to know what Pollack thinks now. It’s another exercise in excuse making.
Ezra Klein is a product of our culture of lickspittle. He has a reputation because he’s young, published everywhere that’s liberal and is on MSNBC. He does a mea culpa so he has a clear conscience going forward.
The week US armor seized Baghdad and broke the back of Iraqi conventional resistance, the publisher canceled the column. They were buffaloed along with almost everyone else.
War over! Everyone was cheering. George and Dick were right. WMDs were going to be found any day. Old Don Rumsfeld was complaining the news outlets were showing the same videotapes of Iraqis stealing everything not nailed down over and over.
Yay. Don’t you feel things have become so much better?!
In 2004 I was the first person in this country to find that Colin Powell’s Security Council assertion that Hussein’s Iraq had been connected to a ricin plot in London was a fraud. At GlobalSecurity.Org we tried to take it to US newspapers and none would have it. They had simply quit doing their job.
The Wit and Wisdom of Ken Pollack — from the archives. All the way back when I still had a beard because it hadn’t turned half white.
This afternoon, your host, along with thousands of others ran right into it. The Pasadena police, sheriffs, the FBI anti-gang unit, associated SWAT teams, and the Pasadena air force — a chopper, were used to block off and patrol a large part of the center of the city on both sides of the 210 highway, from Wilson to Hill Streets, west and east, north to Orange Grove and over the freeway to the south side service road.
Which may not have encompassed all of it.
At “rush hour,” which goes from just before three to past dark, the traffic blockade and police perimeter paralyzed traffic in town.
The operation, which apparently started as an anti-gang sweep, escalated when a car with two suspects collided with a police vehicle.
The suspects fled on foot, engaging in a gun battle.
No one was hit but they remain at large, according to this story.
“The Pasadena Police Department BearCat armored vehicle was deployed as were K-9 units from both the Pasadena and Alhambra police department. Officers from Pasadena walked the area searching for the gunman with assault rifles,” reads the piece.
BearCats went into service in urban police forces during the war on terror. Department of Homeland Security grants are often used to pay for them.
Right now I’m having a Rolling Rock. Rolling Rock was a Pennsy beer when I came of age. These days it’s just one of the anonymous lager swills owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev. Nice green cans and bottles, though. Clearly, I have low standards.
As mentioned yesterday, the state of the debate on drone use is zero. There is no debate, none is allowed. While you don’t have to go three yards in the grass roots web media to hear one, all the very important people and the US government cannot be influenced by it.
Yet despite the testy exchanges and the theatrical protests [by Code Pink ladies who were ejected], it’s worth noting that not a single senator said he or she opposed targeted killings. It was perhaps a recognition that drones are here to stay—a permanent part of America’s hi-tech 21st-century arsenal. Indeed, instead of a dramatic moral showdown, the hearing showcased evidence that Congress and the Obama administration could be moving toward pragmatic compromises …
Consider the lethal targeting of Anwar al Awlaki, the American citizen and al Qaeda member who was killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. Awlaki was actually placed on the kill list before the Justice Department had finished its opinion, though Obama’s lawyers had already weighed in orally. As for due process, it was far more informal than anything Feinstein envisions. One example: before State Department legal adviser Harold Koh was willing to give his blessing to the deliberate killing of an American, even one who had joined an enemy force, he wanted to scrutinize the intelligence himself. So in March 2010, he holed up in a secure room in the State Department and pored over hundreds of pages of classified reports detailing Awlaki’s alleged involvement in terror plots. Koh had set his own standard to justify the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen: he felt that Awlaki would have to be shown to be “evil,??? with iron-clad intelligence to prove it. After absorbing the chilling intel, which included multiple bombing plots and elaborate plans to attack Americans with ricin and cyanide, Koh concluded that Awlaki was not just evil; he was “satanic.???
In one paragraph, the meretricious rationalization cited yesterday, the line of allegation always used to steamroll thoughtful discussion:
Technology has advanced so far, the little tribes of really poor people, even single individuals, can develop weapons of mass destruction.
In this case, the old boogieman, Anwar al-Alaki — now dead, elevated to “satanic power,” out in the desert wastes of Yemen, virtually dead broke and without any infrastructure, allegedly capable of making a ricin WMD.
Castor seeds, which are where one gets ricin, cannot make a weapon of mass destruction. Indeed, no one has ever made a WMD from ricin, or even made a convincing stab at one.
Yet these are the types of horrendous distortions, now used as received wisdom, for the virtual justification of pre-emptive attacks in the desperate and destitute places of the world.
Homeland Security magazine, edited by Dan Verton, had an interesting piece on the issue of domestic drones the other day. It mentioned that lower level grass roots opposition had canceled a police drone program in Seattle.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn on Feb. 6, announced the cancellation of the Seattle Police Department’s controversial surveillance drone program after citizens and civil liberties groups voiced concerns about privacy.
McGinn joins a growing list of state and local officials who are buckling under extreme pressure from their constituents and privacy advocates who argue that police departments are moving too far, too fast, on drone deployments without concrete policies and procedures to safeguard the privacy of law-abiding citizens.
State legislatures around the country are also stepping up activities designed to limit or ban the use of domestic surveillance drones. To date, Florida, Maine, Montana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Virginia have introduced anti-drone bills.
Domestic drones are financed by block grants from the Department of Homeland Security. They are part of a much larger phenomenon, one which has seen national taxpayer dollars pay for the military weaponization of small local police forces.
Locally, a good example was the acquisition of an armored car last year by the South Pasadena police force.
All the hardware, drones now included, becomes appealing to police forces because it appears free. That is, the cost is distributed over the entire population. Like food stamps, only the dollars spent on drones aren’t funneled back into the community as food buys at the local markets.
“It’s a dynamic situation that is subject to change,” said Aftergood. “Industry clearly had a head start, with strong support in Congress and a rosy view of the future full of potential applications for unmanned aerial systems. But privacy values are deeply rooted in society and will have to be addressed by all parties. The debate cannot be avoided indefinitely. It needs to be engaged directly.”
Aftergood is correct. There does need to be a debate and there is already a groundswell of noise on the matter.
However, it comes from all the sources the US government ignores. And nothing good will happen until major news sources start covering drones without just going to the usual experts, chosen from defense think tanks, whose job it is to be fuglemen — wingmen — for whatever the national security machine is pushing.
The argument presented by the side of evil, the forces recommending more and more drones, is one in which they are presented as great and inexorable technological advances, things which make war less bloody.
The technology is not spectacular. And the argument obfuscates by not framing it within an expanded context of American and global reality.
This expanded view recognizes that that the US government/military has moved to take on the role of prosecuting special operations against whomever it thinks necessary in all the desperate and poor corners of the world. War on terror is the rationalization.
This has nothing to do with technology. It is to keep the industries of war moving. It is also is linked to a meme which has become pernicious received wisdom: Technology has advanced so far, the little tribes of really poor people, even single individuals, can develop weapons of mass destruction.
I’ve spent close to a decade as something called a Senior Fellow for GlobalSecurity.Org arguing that’s not true, that it’s a construct that has been passed off because it’s a semantic weapon for the national security industry, one used to steamroll thoughtful discussion.
Drones don’t operate in an environment where the purported adversary has any equivalent technology, or usually, even much of an infrastructure. They are used against populations that cannot mount a conventional defense because they are destitute. Or, as in Pakistan where an air defense could perhaps, theoretically, be mounted, allowed by bribing the government into non-interference over the regions of the poorest with weapon sales and cash assistance.
There is a moral issue in that and the United States is not on the right side of it.
I wrote above that the “debate” on drones has not been such a thing. It is not hard to find dismay and counterargument at the grass roots level.
However, the formal “debate,” what little there is of it, is dominated by the hand puppets of the American government and national security apparatus.
Read an absolutely amazing article today. Entitled “Droning on about Drones,” it was published in the online version of Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest and most widely read English-language newspaper, and written by one Michael Kugelman, identified as the Senior Program Associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
In this piece, the author’s thesis is that all this fuss about America’s drone policy is overdone and perhaps a little hysterical. Yes, he admits, there are some figures that suggest that as many as 900 civilians have been killed in drone strikes between 2004 and 2013. But, he notes, that only averages out to about 100 civilians a year. Apparently, we need to put that number in perspective:
“Now let’s consider some very different types of statistics.”In 2012, measles killed 210 children in Sindh. Karachiites staged numerous anti-drones protests last year, but I don’t recall them holding any rallies to highlight a scourge that was twice as deadly for their province’s kids than drone strikes were for Pakistani civilians.”Nor do I recall any mass action centered around unsafe water. More people in Karachi die each month from contaminated water than have been killed by India’s army since 1947 . . . 630 Pakistani children die from water-borne illness every day (that’s more than three times the total number of Pakistani children the BIJ believes have died from drone strikes since 2004).”
Adds Taibbi: “So there it is, folks. Welcome to the honor of American citizenship. Should we replace E Pluribus Unum with We Don’t Kill as Many Children as Measles? Of course people aren’t mad about bombs being dropped on them from space without reason; they’re mad because anti-Americanism is alluring!”
There’s nothing to add.
Well, there is actually. You can expand the argument to justify drone use just about everywhere in the impoverished world.
Malaria kills [five figures] each year [some country in Africa. Drones, by contrast, have only killed 140.
Roll your own, arguing drone fatalities as something less horrid than many of the world’s most famous diseases. And therefore OK.
AN internet geek from Burnley who was caught with an Al-Qaeda manual and the Anarchist’s Cookbook has been told he should spend less time online.
But Mr Justice Fulford, sitting at the Old Bailey, ruled that Niall Florence, 21, was not a terrorist but a ‘young and naive computer addict’.
Florence was auctioning off copies of the Anarchist’s Cookbook, the infamous 1971 guide to bomb-making, lock-picking and credit card fraud, on the e-Bay website.
And he sold 25 copies, at £1 each, before police swooped on his parents’ home in St Cuthbert’s Street in December 2011 …
Police also found an Al Qaeda jihadist training manual, during the raid, and instructions on how to make the poison ricin.
Florence was about eleven years old when the original suspects in the London ricin trial were arrested.
Florence received a suspended sentence on convictions for “collecting a record of information for terrorist purposes and one count of disseminating terrorist publications.”
The judge admitted he recognized Florence was not a terrorist and “posed no threat to the public.”
Morgan Gliedman, 27, and Aaron Greene, 31, were arrested Saturday in their Manhattan apartment after officers with a search warrant found 7 grams of HMTD, a highly explosive white powder used in bomb making. Police also seized a flare launcher, a sawed-off shotgun, nine rifle magazines and various how-to manuals on building bombs and booby traps.
“They had a terrorist encyclopedia, they had improvised and modified firearms, deadly homemade weapons, a do it yourself machine gun…” New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Monday.
Kelly was unsure how much damage 7 grams of HMTD would cause.
HMTD is homemade explosive similar to TATP, the latter made with hydrogen peroxide and other fairly easily available ingredients. TATP caused a furor in homeland security for a few years even though no terrorists were successful with it in the US. (The Zazi case being the big example.)
The police had the apartment building evacuated. Seven grams of HMTD is not a threat to such a structure.
The preliminary report asserts the couple were heroin users.
What’s worth remembering goes a little deeper than what Americans are comfortable with.
It put the country into a war with the Axis Powers, Japan and Germany (and Il Duce’s Italy), the first two countries possessing militaries that could smash American forces.
The Imperial Japanese Navy was the most powerful naval force in the world on December 7th. And it would remain a dangerous and formidable foe for years.
Even after Midway, the Japanese fleet still had nasty surprises in store for American fighting men. In August of 1942, a Japanese heavy cruiser force utterly destroyed a US cruiser force off Guadalcanal in the Battle of Savo Island. It was the worst surface action group defeat this country has ever suffered.
The Japanese Navy fought at night, had deadly destroyer-launched torpedo tactics, and at Savo achieved complete tactical surprise.
James Hornfischer’s Neptune’s Inferno chronicles that battle and many others off Guadalcanal and in the Solomon’s at a time during the war when US fighting men often went into action out gunned, frequently with the expectation that they would die at the hands of the Japanese.
Today, all that’s lost in the memorial of December 7. To Americans it’s a day when the Japanese sneak attacked the US Navy, achieving a victory that’s flamingly chronicled in old movies.
And then we joined the war, kicked their asses and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yaaaay!
It’s transformed into another ritual reference with virtually no meaning, particularly when contrasted with the country’s current relationship with its military.
The US military is the most powerful in world history and it never goes into action expecting to lose. And in the last twelve years it has never faced a capable opponent. Not even close.
It exists, and does its thing, whatever the current political leadership asks. This has no linkage relationship with what the US, and everyone, had to do in WWII in cooperating to destroy the Axis powers and preserve freedom in the west. Anyone who believes differently is a fool and insulting to history.
So over the weekend I read All In, Paula Broadwell’s slobberific biography of General David Petraeus. It was nothing special, just a typically crappy piece of fawning, noncritical journalism …
You can pretty much guess the rest of the plot from there. Every environment Petraeus enters is instantly bettered by his majestic personage … We see Petraeus giving stirring speeches, working past midnight until aides tear him away from his desk, and stoically receiving compliments from grateful colleagues …
Then it hit me – it was an interesting book, after all! Because if you read All In carefully, the book’s tone will remind you of pretty much any other authorized bio of any major figure in business or politics …
Which means: it’s impossible to tell the difference between the tone of a reporter who we now know was literally sucking the dick of her subject and the tone of just about any other modern American reporter who is given access to a powerful person for a biography or feature-length profile.
Since Petraeus’ departure both Democrats and Republicans have been mourning the loss of a public servant of extraordinary ability … But thanks to our ever-faster cycle of humiliation and rehabilitation, he has already been punished and paroled. It’s time to let Petraeus get back to work.
A public servant of extraordinary ability.
Others might say you could pick just about anyone to continue the bombing campaign executed by CIA drones in Pakistan, Yemen and anywhere else.
The problems facing the country are still very great. What to do about global warming. How should the country be prepared? How can the United States regain world leadership in health care, equality and the general well-being of its citizenry? How can it restore real educational opportunity in an advancing world? How can it restore an economy that works for everyone and dislodge the grip of predatory big business upon national policy-making?
Whether or not David Petraeus is around is not relevant to any of the above.
Petraeus was a big machine among the other big machines prosecuting a decade long war on terror, an adventure built upon many frauds, all created to further war industries, political agendas and replace the one big enemy lost at the end of the Cold War with a new and never-ending one.
Superciliousness is a reasonable reaction. The scandal is a somewhat fortunate convenience in bringing on his retirement.
The Salon piece informs Petraeus already has gained the services of a DC lawyer famous for getting seven digit book contracts for national figures. As is the pattern, the disgraced CEO, or leader of some kind, is given a compensatory reward in gold to see him off.
