What General David Petraeus said behind closed doors with a Fox News analyst in the spring of 2011, just weeks before he accepted his position as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was never supposed to be heard by a wannabe political observer like me. Bob Woodward of The Washington Post yesterday released a tape of General David Petraeus in an “off the record” chat with Kathleen McFarland of Fox News, regarding his future as the leading General in the war in Afghanistan and possible presidential ambitions. McFarland plays more of a messenger than a reporter in this masterpiece theater for political junkies.
Petraeus: I’m not running. [Laughs]
Q: Okay. But I’m going to tell you that Roger Ailes — and I told him I was coming . . .
Petraeus: I love Roger.
Q: I know. And he loves you, and everybody at Fox loves you. So what I’m supposed to say directly from him to you, through me, is first of all, is there anything Fox is doing, right or wrong, that you want to tell us to do differently?
Petraeus: You know, actually, ask Bret Baier about this, because I actually did say that I thought that. . . . I actually thought, in a sense, sort of the editorial policy of Fox had shifted. Now, that . . .
Q: On the online, or on the news channel?
Petraeus: Well, I only watch the — you know, the. . . . But I mean, it’s your stories that are online here. But it just struck me that it was almost as if, because they’re going after Obama, they had to go after Obama’s war as well, actually. And I told that to Bret when he was out here. That — again, some of it was headlines, but they . . .
Q: Well, headlines is easy to fix, because the lady who does that is the desk next to mine, if you…
McFarland starts by asking the active General if he would like to change the headlines for Fox. She then delivers Petraeus political advice from Fox CEO Roger Ailes. Pay attention to the career advice at the end:
Q: Now, the other thing — I know you’ve only got a minute left — the other thing, which is directly advice to you from Roger Ailes is . . .
Man: You want us to leave, sir? [Laughter]
Petraeus: [Laughs] I’m not runnin’.
Q: That’s not the question at this point. He says that if you’re offered chairman, take it. If you’re offered anything else, don’t take it, resign in six months and run for president. Okay? And I know you’re not running for president. But at some point when you go to New York next, you may want to just chat with Roger. And Rupert Murdoch, for that matter.
She goes on later to say the Murdoch would even “bankroll” Petraeus’s campaign. However enticing this offer “straight from the top” was, it didn’t win over Petraeus. What his sights were set on and the fact that he is being as honest can be, given that this is off the record, is what came out of this that was truly important for our collective knowledge of America in the 21st century:
Petraeus: Well . . . Well, Rupert’s after me, as well. Look, I . . . what I have told people is, I truly want to continue to serve my country if it is in a — you know, a quite significantly meaningful position. And there’s all of about two of those in the world. You all have really got to shut your mouths — or shut your . . . Yeah, shut your mouths, too.
Those two “meaningful positions” are chief of staff and the head of the CIA. In the next part of the transcript, the “peace dividend” is about the lack of growth in the war industry after long conflicts. They go on:
Petraeus: I mean, we’ve got . . . so if that’s the extent of what we’re going to do, we’re going to be retrenching militarily.
Petraeus: Again, you’re going to take big budget cuts, and it’s going to be all about . . . it’s going to be the post-, sort of the early 1990s kind of stuff.
Q: Yeah. It’ll be the “peace dividend” after Iraq, and after Afghanistan, it’ll be the peace dividend. Libya is a little bit of a screw-up on that.
Petraeus: Yeah. Yeah. But on the other hand, the other folks — on the other hand — I think are going to be in a growth industry.
Q: You mean Obamacare . . .
Petraeus: No, intelligence.
Q: Oh, the bad guys?
Petraeus: Yeah, the intelligence community, I think, is going to be . . .
Q: The bad guys, or our — you mean our intelligence community?
Petraeus: Our intelligence community. Going to have to be. I mean, there’s so much going on.
The “growth industry” is the key. Petraeus officially said what the rest of the world has been talking about while we never even mention our army: That the United States has begun and will continue to use the covert intelligence as a strong wing of the military. Straight from Petraeus’s seat, it becomes clear that intelligence is no longer just about finding out more about your enemy, or even assassinations; intelligence now kills the enemy in numbers. Covert drone operations have now killed around 3,000 people. They were not all high-level officials. This new kind of war is the “growth industry” that David Petraeus chose instead of the Presidency. I can hear Mr. Wimmer in the background: “Dwight Eisenhower warned of a military industrial complex. Write it down.”
The United States is the greatest military force the world has ever seen. We escaped two World Wars with an economy not only unscathed, but improved, while the rest of the world was in ruins. It is a good thing that the most powerful military in the world is a force for freedom and democracy, but how it wields its power should not go unexamined. The fact that a television network has been caught on tape acting as a direct wing for a political party is bad enough, but it is even worse that they try to lobby the most powerful man in the military with the option of writing the network’s headlines. One would hope that only Fox would have this incestuous relationship with both the military and a party, but this tape doesn’t make me very optimistic. How this tape landed in the hands of Bob Woodward I may never know, but I am glad that as sleazy as “gotcha” journalists might be sometimes, and they may not necessarily pull away the curtain of Beltway spin, they can at least in cases like this drill a peephole big enough for my curiosity and moral duty to be stimulated. More importantly, we live in a country where this kind of tape isn’t illegal to release.