"Rock, Rock Me, Dave Petraeus!"

Look, pretty much everybody loves strange poontang. I guess that isn't taught in journalism school, but it's hardly news.

But if you've done half as much with the last decade as General David Petraeus (U.S Army, Retired) has done, you should get all the strange poontang your heart desires. If there's one single thing you need to know about me, it's that I'm all about positive reinforcement.

Throughout his military career, Petraeus was the go-to guy when everything goes to shit. If policy objectives were unobtainable, the general could at least make it look as though he won. We saw that in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where he saved the Bush and Obama administrations endless foreign policy embarrassment, if only at home. Most foreign observers knew that both wars were hopeless by the time Petraeus was brought in to command them.

Petraeus was the architect of the surge in Iraq, which, if you remember its original policy objective, was a failure. The surge was supposed to have created a security situation that would allow the political reconciliation between Iraq's warring ethnic factions that was necessary to facilitate a transition to full democracy. As you might have noticed by now, political reconciliation never happened and democracy in Iraq is more or less in a state of suspended animation.

On the other hand, the surge did do something even more important. It created a "decent interval" for the United States to get the fuck out of there. American servicemen stopped being killed at a monstrous clip, which allowed the departing Bush administration to negotiate a deeply flawed Status of Forces Agreement. Better still, that agreement could later be used by Republicans to blame the Obama administration for "losing Iraq."

Essentially, the same thing happened in Afghanistan, which had started collapsing back into chaos as far back as 2005, but everyone was so preoccupied with the ongoing debacle in Iraq that it wasn't noticed. It wasn't until 2010, after the Stanley McChrystal-Rolling Stone clusterfuck, that Petraeus was brought in to save the day.

Pertaeus, like McChrystal, is a counterinsurgency guy. Given the size and population density of Afghanistan, classical counterinsurgency doctrine demands that the United States and its allies would need something along the lines of 300,000 troops to succeed there. That would have been a political non-starter in Washington even before the mess in Iraq. And by the time Obama took office, American public opinion had drifted sharply against the war that Bush ignored for six years.

In 2009-'10, Obama "surged" troops into Afghanistan to about 120,000, or roughly the same level that the Soviet Union had there in the 1980s. It would never be enough to win, especially against the Afghans, who love nothing better than war, but it was enough to create the appearance of a security situation that would allow withdrawal.

I should note that none of this is Petraeus' fault. He was brought into both Iraq and Afghanistan well after both wars were essentially lost by President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. Given what he had to work with, Petraeus was never going to be able to do more than address appearances. But he did that outstandingly well.

Along the way, he became something of a Dwight Eisenhower-Colin Powell-type figure in the eyes of the American people. I would suggest that he's even more impressive, since Ike and Colin were at least given winning wars to fight, a luxury not afforded to Petraeus.

Soon there was talk of General Petraeus running for president, which I myself encouraged. He was certainly more impressive than almost anyone else running in this past cycle. In my opinion, I think he could have been a revolutionary president in the way Eisenhower was, but elective politics wasn't in Petraeus' blood, which I still think is too bad for the country.

Instead, he went to the CIA, where he was an ideal director because you never saw him on television. I've been paying attention to such things for a long time, and I can't remember the last DCI (and yes, I know that the position is now D/CIA) who didn't live on TV. The talk of Petraeus as a shameless self-promoter seemed to end the day he went to Langley.

Which is where we get to the poontang part of the story.

Let me start by saying that I haven't read Paula Broadwell's biography of Petraeus, the retrospectively hilarious titled All In yet. I plan on starting it today. But even here, the general was a strategic genius. If you want a fawning book written about you, I can think of no better way of ensuring that than to give your biographer a good, deep dicking. One can only wonder how much different history would be if Nixon tried it.

Of course, Petraeus had to resign. As sad as this whole stupid mess is, he had no other practical choice. But the narrative is retarded and misleading.

The great Stephen Kinzer - whose books All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror and Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq you really should read because they're awesome - wrote an interesting op-ed in yesterday's New York Times about former CIA director Allen Dulles.

As it happens, Dulles was boning everybody, including during his tenure as DCI. While David Petraeus had one (or maybe two) affairs, Dulles - according to his sister - had "at least a hundred." Among his conquests was the friggin' Queen of Greece!

And while we're on the topic, if Petraeus' appreciation of strange pussy compromises national security to the point that it demands resignation, why wasn't Bill Clinton's?

In his 2000 memoir, Midnight Diaries, former Russian president Boris Yeltsin wrote that he knew about Monica Lewinsky's cocksucking frenzy with Clinton before the American people did, and actually warned him about it! If that doesn't compromise national security, then Barack Obama can start selling America's nuclear launch codes to Bangledesh without fear.

This story wouldn't be complete without Republican new media types - who spent five years giving David Petraeus an even more thorough (to say nothing of public) ball-washing than Paula Broadwell ever did - inserting themselves into it. They're indignant that Petraeus won't testify before Congress this week about Benghazi, because of course he's the only person at CIA who has even heard of it. Assholes.

But there's one important fact that I think everyone is overlooking in this tawdry tale. Paula Broadwell is pretty fucking hot, especially for a 40-year-old Army chick. I'd most assuredly hit it, and I think that's really the most important thing to remember here.