Tom Engelhart: The Fall of the American Empire: History, Farce, and David Petraeus!

History, it is said, arrives first as tragedy, then as farce. First as Karl Marx, then as the Marx Brothers. In the case of twenty first century America, history arrived first as George W Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and the Project for a New America, a shadow government masquerading as a think tank, and an assorted crew of ambitious neocons and neo pundits. Only later did David Petraeus make it onto the scene. It couldn't be clearer now that, from the shirtless FBI agent to the embedded biographer and the other other woman, the fall of David Petraeus is playing out as farce of the first order. What's less obvious is that Petraeus, America's military golden boy and Caesar of celebrity, was always smoke and mirrors, always the farce, even if the denizens of Washington didn't know it. Until recently, here was the open secret to Petraeus's life: He may not have understood Iraqis or Afghans, but no military man in generations more intuitively grasped how to flatter and charm American reporters, pundits, and politicians into praising him. This was, after all, the general who got his first Newsweek cover ("Can This Man Save Iraq?") in 2004 while he was making a mess of a training program for Iraqi forces, and two more before that magazine, too, took the fall. In 2007, he was runner up to Vladimir Putin for Time's "Person of the Year." And long before Paula Broadwell's aptly named biography, All In, was published to hosannas from the usual elite crew, that was par for the course. You didn't need special insider's access to know that Broadwell wasn't the only one with whom the general did calisthenics. the FBI didn't need to investigate. Even before she came on the scene, scads of columnists, pundits, reporters, and politicians were in bed with him. Weirdly enough, many of them still are. Typical was NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams mournfully discussing the "painful" resignation of "Dave" "the most prominent and best known general of the modern era." Adoring media people treated him like the next military Messiah, a combination of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Ulysses S Grant rolled into one fabulous pinata.