
-- The Washington Post, September 22, 2010
General Petraeus met with President-elect Barack Obama in Chicago in December, 2008 to discuss counterinsurgency options for Afghanistan. While peeling at the label of a bottle of Woodchuck Cider, he cautioned against “sending a boy to do a man’s job.”
At a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels last March, Petraeus told the Parliamentary Assembly that he had come to “kick some ass and drink some Trappist ale,” before noting that he was “all out of Chimay Grand Reserve.”
In June, after exiting a smoldering building in Marja, Afghanistan seconds before it exploded, Petraeus did not once look back at the flames. Instead, he lit a clove cigarette and remarked to a senior State Department official that he “love[s] it when a plan comes together.”
During a 120-to-86 rout of the Portland Trailblazers in March, Petraeus swatted a ten-foot jumper by LaMarcus Aldridge into the visitors bench while screaming, “Get outta my house!” He then waved his finger at a courtside camera during transition.
After a heated discussion with Vice President Joe Biden in January on the efficacy of counterinsurgency in rural areas, Petraeus took a long sip from his vodka lemonade before urging Biden not to “write checks [that Biden’s] ass can’t cash.”
In a July interview with Time magazine’s Joe Klein, Petraeus accused critics of the strategy known as “The Surge” of lacking basic military knowledge. “If these idiots fell into a pile of tits,” he said, pausing to drink from a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, “They’d come out sucking their thumbs.”
On his hip-hop album “Money, Power, Women” (Priority Records, 2010; released under the pseudonym CENTCOM), Petraeus makes at least 92 references to the film “Scarface.”
Foreign Policy’s Thomas E. Ricks asked Petraeus in a May, 2009 interview whether Afghanistan’s reputation as “the graveyard of empires” troubled him. After first contrasting the American effort to previous invasions, Petraeus sipped piña colada from a coconut goblet and added ruefully, “Then again, the bigger they come…”