(D)ude: Man! I must bring up the ten crucial minutes of Retired General David Petraeus’s interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe right before the cyberattack on the East Coast of the United States on Friday, October 21, 2016.
(M)an: Dude! How was the transcribing process? You said that you wrote up a transcript using the DVR recording of the General Petraeus interview.
D: Man! It is unedited, but that doesn’t mean I did not have to search over the Internet and make sure that I had spelled out the names of the individuals that General Petraeus brings up, correctly. Listening to General Petraeus, you get a sense of how military greats in history must have maneuvered through battles and warfare. It is a shame that the Republican Party and Donald Trump and Mike Pence cannot recollect the heroism and selflessness of the men and women in uniform in recent history, always going back generations to the times of Douglas MacArthur in World War I and George S. Patton in World War II. The Republican Party and Donald Trump and Mike Pence believe in indiscriminately bombing the region and promoting nuclear warfare in the new millennium, even going so far as to inadvertently admit their own ignorance about the region’s geography. Remember how Donald Trump actually did not know that Mosul was in Northern Iraq during the second presidential debate? Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, like General David Petraeus, are brilliant to the point of dissolving party lines between the Republicans and the Democrats in their outlook to move the United States into the next industrial revolution, which will be global and green and humanitarian, not divisive and dangerous. Just listen to the sheer genius in General Petraeus’s thoughtful and thorough answer to what constitutes a success in the fractured Middle East.
Yes, there is no question about that. We have reconstituted the Iraqi forces — retrained, reequipped, remanned them. We are advising and assisting in providing an armada of manned and unmanned aircraft over them with precision strike. Great leaders like Lieutenant General Steve Townsend, who fought in Mosul during the surge, knows that area. By the way, I spent the first year in Iraq there as commander of the great one hundred and first airborne division then. No question. It will be a tough fight. We’ve seen what ISIS is willing to do: they use suicide bombers and tunnels, explosives — all of that. But at the end of the day, the Iraqi forces will clearly prevail. That’s not the real battle. The real battle comes after the Islamic State, and after they clear out of the rest of the Nineveh Province all the way to the Syrian border. And that’s about politics in the most complex human terrain in all of Iraq: Sunni Arab majority but Shia Arabs, Christian Yazidis, Halabja Kurds.
M: Dude! General Petraeus’s assessment is the most compassionate of all. The American Press Corps is misleading and misdirecting readers to the point of denigrating itself to tabloid status.
D: Man! The American Press Corps is divisive and biased, clearly favoring the irrational Congressional Republicans and their obscene frontrunner Donald Trump. But, fortunately, I caught General Petraeus’s nonpartisan insights into the situation in Iraq and its many provinces. According to General David Petraeus,
They are all united in the desire to clear the Islamic State from Mosul and, again, the rest of Iraq. There are Iraqi security forces — army and police units, the counter-terrorist forces that they bring up every time they need something particularly difficult done. There are Shia militias that are really sponsored in the sense, directed to a degree, by Iran. There are Kurds working for the Kurdish regional government leaders, and there are even some Sunni militias from the tribes in Nineveh Province as well. So you have a big grouping of these. And that’s, indeed, what the challenge is going to be after the Islamic State is done. That unifying force now becomes much more a case of them all struggling to achieve power and resources, which is what Iraq has always been about at the national level as well. As you know, in Baghdad right now, the Prime Minister who is focusing the attention of the country on Mosul — he has got to watch his own back politically because the former prime minister is coming after him and has votes of no confidence that have taken out his ministers of interior, defense, and finance. So this is, you know, a full contact sport here and Mosul will be a microcosm of that and there will be also further political wrangling in Baghdad as well. The U.S., a great ambassador, Doug Silliman; again, Lt. General Steve Townsend; and others — in fact, the commander of the hundred and first airborne division now is there as well, Gary Volesky. They are all going to have to help nudge this along and encourage it and cajole it but, at the end of the day, it has to be Iraqis who come together and achieve governance in Mosul that is representative of all the different elements, responsive to them, and guarantees — most importantly — minority rights as well as majority rule.
M: Dude! Irrational and obscene leadership as displayed by the congressional Republicans and Donald Trump is the direct result of 2010’s Citizens United. The American Voter must understand that. And the American Voter must accept responsibility for being gifted the freedoms that the United States of America has afforded them all throughout our 240-year history. The American Voter must exercise the right to vote during this election cycle because this is the last chance to guarantee those liberties that our forefathers and foremothers fought for throughout the tumultuous history of our country to mobilize as many of US as possible to realize our God-given potentials. This is the time for US to honor that ancestral greatness and sustain our values and the highest standards in the face of such wretchedness that Citizens United and a sellout American Press Corps have brought upon the American Electorate, upon US.
D: Man! An issue of Smithsonian Magazine had an interesting article about the diet of gladiators, describing how humans are able to penetrate layers of past civilizations via computer technology that enables us to excavate historical sites without physical excavation techniques, which lead to undesired damage that future generations of archeologists must address alongside their findings. The process was cumbersome, but not anymore. An excellent example of how computer technology has enhanced and sometimes even opened doors to discoveries that otherwise would remain unforeseen is, as I said, the diet of gladiators. According to Frank Lidz’s article in the July/August 2016 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, gladiators were reportedly disciplined vegetarians in history, but scientists could not make sense of a chicken bone left behind in one of the arenas where they had fought. Turns out, the chicken bone wasn’t indicative of a lapse in the dietary habits of a gladiator or gladiators, but more about the dietary demands of the public spectators who came to watch them fight. You see, there were commissioned vendors in the audience who made their way through the crowds offering snack items like chicken drumsticks just the way people in the United States today have an inexplicable appetite for chicken wings.
M: Dude! Does General Petraeus think we are doing enough in the Middle East? What is his assessment of our situation with Putin and al-Assad?
D: Man! Well, according to the General,
Well, increasingly, we are doing enough and more. I’ve said for some time that the sooner you could show that the Islamic State is a loser, the sooner they are no longer effective in social media where they really distinguished themselves in addition to having a caliphate. So that was important and it has taken time to develop this momentum, to be sure. One of your other guests, General Mike Hayden, used to say that this was under-resourced and over-regulated. I don’t think that is the case now in Iraq. There is also development in North Africa, Afghanistan, Syria. In Syria, though, I think there has to be more done because there has to be a change in the military context. Secretary [John] Kerry says, for example, that there is no military solution. I’m not sure Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad got that memo because they seem intent on that. But he [John Kerry] is undoubtedly right at the end of the day. But there has got to be a change in the military context or there is not going to be any negotiation that is meaningful. So, I think, a safe zone — built on the now-existing Turkish safe zone that they are establishing — then, where we are — over in the Northeastern part of the country — there are no fly zones, telling Bashar al-Assad that if his forces drop barrel bombs on the people then we will ground his air force. Now, you have to do this very, very carefully because Russian air power is in there and we don’t want to be provocative and start world war three over Syria. Having said that, if we don’t show this kind of additional toughness and firmness, I don’t think we’re going to have a context within which we can get anything appreciable negotiated.
M: Dude! The process General David Petraeus describes requires restraint and respect, characteristics that are deplete inside the Republican Party and Donald Trump. Like the technical breakthroughs that you detailed above, restraint and respect must be exercised with our men and women in uniform. They see the day-to-day realities being faced by civilians and infantries, hence, they are the best brokers of peace in the world. We need them to return home to solutions to their traumas and a celebration of their triumphs and a future filled with the opportunities to bond communities across the United States and globe.
D: Man! I think physical warfare is an appendage that the Republicans and Donald Trump exploit while plundering treasuries all over the world. The reality is that we must sever with this grotesqueness within the Republican Party. General David Petraeus is exceptional strength for the United States of America as are our sons and daughters in uniform deployed all over the world. The new millennium is different and diverse and directly connected to the human forum that is the Internet. I think we must explore and expand this human forum towards beneficence. General Petraeus also brings up the need to reflect before reacting and addresses the Republican and Democratic divide that Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are trying to suture without forgetting the everyday working poor like us.
I think there are some understandable issues here. I’ve sat at that Situation Room table. I’ve had the, “And then what?” And then what do the Russians do? And then do the Iranians have the Shia militia attack us in Iraq? So these are very, very legitimate questions and they are being asked. I can assure you, I was with Brett McGurk the other day, the Special Presidential Envoy for the fighting against the Islamic State — who was back then a Bush — and now an Obama — appointee, working very, very hard as well. And again, there are very, very legitimate, “And then what?” kinds of questions.
M: Dude! Going back to that article you read, about the dietary misunderstanding about the gladiators that was clarified through scientific breakthroughs via noninvasive excavations of historic sites that have proven even more efficient and effective in the long run, I wonder whether physical warfare, an appendage of today’s post-Citizens United Republican Party, is the downside of the kind of monopolistic capitalism that Republican donors like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson and the Waltons of Wal-Mart want to implement for the sake of remaining exorbitantly wealthy.
D: Man! The exorbitantly wealthy went after the Supreme Court of the United States in 2010 and got the verdict they wanted in Citizens United. Plus, the RSLC Redistricting Majority Project or RED MAP ambush that year, to focus on the down ballot races in order to turn local and state governments red in a census year via gerrymandering, cost Republican financiers hundreds of billions of dollars, not the thirty or so million that Rachel Maddow reported on her evening show on MSNBC when describing one of the architects of RED MAP as “a genius.” Underhanded manipulative tactics like RED MAP, reportedly costing millions when in fact hundreds of billions were invested into it for it to become the success it became, are the first steps towards downgrading the United States to Third World status. Listen to the praise that David Petraeus had to give to Silicon Valley techies for assisting in anti-recruitment materials to obstruct the Dark Net that ISIS depends upon so heavily.
There is momentum building there as well. There is an element created at the State Department to oversee all this — very impressive guy who is in charge of that — and what is most heartening is that groups like Google and Twitter are now much more active there as well. Jared Cohen at Google Ideas, now Jigsaw, has unveiled something that when you type in a certain phrase or word that would be extremism or ISIS or what-have-you, you not only get back the stuff you’re presumably looking for — if you are a would-be jihadist, you get other items back as well. It is like — they say it is what the cyber folks have done with respect to suicide. If you type that in, it says, “Yeah. You can do that. You can slit your wrists but, you know, it really is painful and doesn’t always work. So you may want to sit under a tree until the thought passes.” Same now with ISIS — and on bit more serious note, if you will.
M: Dude! Our sons and daughters in uniform deserve far more than what they get when they return home. The publishing houses and the press corps are all slanted heavily toward the status quo and, as a result, the American Voter only gets exposure to that status quo perspective in print and on television. It is at its most chronic state right now with celebrity and the objectification of girls and women. The old money folks were shown the door during the Reagan Administration while the disenfranchised were made to turn against their own. As a result of these aftereffects of Reaganomics, we had the rise of a certain class of new money folks who deluded themselves into thinking highly of themselves via adopting the meaningless lexicon of William Buckley.
D: Man! We have the meaningless lexicon of Bill O’Reilly today, a relative of William Buckley’s. Like William Buckley, Bill O’Reilly spews forth utter nonsense that has degraded significantly through the generation separating the distant uncle and nephew. Likewise, within the Republican Party, there is a visible deterioration in successive generations where there is exorbitant wealth. And even General Petraeus agrees that bureaucracies must be dealt with, not privatized like Donald Trump and the GOP plan to do if they win the executive and legislative branches this election cycle. General Petraeus said the following in his concluding remarks,
I think we have to grapple with the bureaucracy — the caregivers, as you said, are wonderful at the V.A. The doctors and nurses and mental health professionals — they are exceptional, truly selfless. But to get to them, you have a lot of bureaucracy. You have to penetrate that — to get your bills paid and get outpatient treatment — whatever — and that has to be attacked. And I think that Congress working with the Secretary of the V.A. [Robert McDonald] — again, [Robert McDonald], a fellow veteran, can take this on but they [the United States Congress] are going to have to give him some nonstandard capabilities, if you will, so that he can take the kinds of actions necessary to improve that aspect of the V.A.
M: Dude! The exorbitantly wealthy today are the Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin of yesterday.
D: Man! Vote for the Clinton and Kaine and Democratic ticket America! Vote for your children’s children’s futures and our sons and daughters in uniform to advance beyond combat roles and into the realm of globalized diplomacy through rebuilding of world economies from the bottom up and the middle out, as Hillary Clinton has reiterated at rallies and in the book she coauthored with Tim Kaine! Clinton and Kaine have the knowhow to effectively renegotiate all the trade deals for a brighter tomorrow for all the world to cherish, not perish as the GOP and Donald Trump and Mike Pence and their Republican donors would like us all to do for the purposes of them plundering the world economies for personal wealth.
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