Petraeus for President

The New Yorker has achieved the impossible: it has united Barack Obama and John McCain. Both camps are competing to outdo one another in denouncing the magazine’s cover illustration, which shows Senator Obama dressed in robes and head gear normally associated with Islamist-type radicals and Michelle Obama with an Afro and dressed in fatigues like a 1970s radical with a sub-machine gun slung on her shoulder celebrating their takeover of the White House by burning the Stars and Stripes.The editor of the magazine, David Remnick, says that no New Yorker reader would ever take such visual satire literally. However ironical the cartoon was intended to be, the real irony is that only a liberal magazine could get away with this.My guess is that the New Yorker cover could have unintended consequences. The conspiracy theories that have been doing the rounds on the more outré conservative Web logs have now received a seal of respectability from the most impeccably liberal source possible. Mr. Obama’s credentials, never fully investigated before, can now be scrutinized ad nauseam under the aegis of “irony.”How the McCain campaign must be rejoicing to have the heat taken off their faltering candidate. The Arizona senator’s admission that he had never sent an e-mail, much less surfed the Internet by himself, was damaging enough in its reminder of the age factor.What made it even worse, though, was its revelation that the Republican candidate is such a pampered, cocooned Washington bigwig that he can’t be bothered to learn a skill that every five-year-old has mastered, because he has flunkies — including the much put-upon Cindy — to do it for him. It will be even more difficult now for most ordinary Americans to imagine being led by a guy who seems unaware of the biggest invention since the invention of the printing press. I like and admire John McCain, but he makes President Bush look like Albert Einstein.Still, the repercussions of the New Yorker cartoon may last a while. Isn’t it strange how the political cartoon, a quintessentially 18th century art-form, has come to such prominence again in the 21st century? And what do the cartoon of the Obamas and the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed have in common? Islam.So far as I am aware, it is not yet blasphemous to caricature the Prophet Barack (peace be upon his name). But it is pretty damn close. If I were David Remnick, I wouldn’t rely on Democratic fundamentalists seeing the funny side of this.Talking to a Washington insider on a visit to London the other day, I got the impression that conservatives and neoconservatives are in a double bind: they don’t believe that Mr. McCain can win, and they also don’t believe in the fall-back plan — that a future President Obama would abandon his crazier and more craven policies quicker than he can say “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” The consensus was that with Mr. Obama, what you see is what you get — and what you see gets scarier by the day.Does anybody believe that if Mr. Obama is elected by a landslide in November, with a Democratic House and Senate to boot, he won’t go on to win a second term? Well, I do. General Petraeus, the architect of the “Surge,” is probably more popular right now than either of the presidential candidates, and if he were to run against Mr. Obama in 2012, he could win.What gives me confidence in the general is something he told the London Sunday Times: “We did a lot of counterintelligence in Vietnam, but somewhere in the 1980s we threw all those lessons away,” Mr. Petraeus said.“We vowed never to get embroiled like that again. But we did, and we needed to reassess those lessons and remake them into a new doctrine. We are in the process of transforming a team that has been coached to play football into a group of people who also know how to play chess … They’re still going to have to put their helmets on, but they have to know chess as well.”General Petraeus has proved he has the ability to learn from the mistakes of his predecessors in Iraq. Likewise, he could the lessons of a Republican defeat in 2008. But is he a political general — a soldier who can survive in the jungle of D.C.? Past American experience — Eisenhower apart — has not been too promising. But David Petraeus could also learn from the political misjudgements made by Colin Powell and, before him, by Alexander Haig and many others.It’s a long shot, I agree. But don’t underestimate the admiration, even reverence, that a great general can inspire in a grateful nation. I am not thinking of megalomaniacs with a Napoleon syndrome: they do not flourish in mature democracies, as Douglas MacArthur found out.But the example of the Emperor Hadrian — subject of a magnificent new exhibition at the British Museum — is worth considering. A soldier’s soldier — hence the military beard and hairstyle, previously disdained by emperors — Hadrian lived in a world which valued martial glory much more highly than our own. Yet as soon as he took the purple, the emperor withdrew his forces inside defensible borders, which he proceeded to fortify: Hadrian’s Wall, spanning northern England, survives to this day. These remained the borders of the Roman Empire until its decline and fall.General Petraeus has the same kind of nous — he plays chess, not football. If a President Obama were to overrule this strategic genius by insisting on a premature pullout from Iraq, he would not only most likely be mistaken — he would also go far to persuade General Petraeus to enter the political realm in 2012. Long after everyone has forgotten the New Yorker cartoon, they will remember that America was winning the war against Al Qaeda until Mr. Obama abandoned the main battlefield.Mr. Johnson is the editor of Standpoint.

Petraeus for President

Petraeus for President

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