Petraeus, Westhusing and the Lessons of Belisarius

General David Petraeus, Col. Theodore Westhusing and The Lessons of Belisarius

The great General Belisarius, blind and begging in the street.
By painter Jacques-Louis David.

By Winsip Custer CPW News Service

      Legend has it that one of Rome's most celebrated Generals was never really appreciated by his Emperor, Justinian. Embedded with Roman General Belisarius was historian Procopius, a forerunner of a battlefield chronicler like Christian T. Miller whose book on the second Iraq War, Blood Money, begins with the death of beloved West Point soldier, professor and Greek scholar, Col. Theodore Westhusing.  Assigned the task of training an indigenous security force of Iraqi soldiers, but seeing the American corruption of empire builders and private contractors and the unreported civilian “collateral damage”, Westhusing confronted America’s Bellasarius, General Petraeus.  Four hours later Westhusing was dead of a disputed suicide.

     Perhaps Westhusing was thinking of Thomas Jefferson's words from the Declaration of Independence....that when the corruption becomes so widespread it is the citizen's right, indeed duty, to throw off that goverment's tyrrany.  With the President as “Commander in Chief” it is hard to know whether a General is working for the best interests of the Republic or for a President who has severed himself from the values of the body politik.  If the President’s policies are at odds with the Republic what is a soldier to do? Resign?  The short answer is “yes”, but the lengthier one is mitigated by many other concerns.

General Petraeus fainting during his testimony before Congress.

     Roman Emperor, Justinian I (Flavius Anicius Justinianus), the nephew of Justin I, was born at Tauresium in Illyria..  He was educated at Constantinople and in 527 was proclaimed sole emperor and was crowned along with his wife, Theodora.
      Justinian’s war with Persia ended with a treaty favorable to Justinian, but the victory was followed by the Nika riots, which culminated in the election of a rival emperor. Justinian prepared to flee Constantinople but thanks to Theodora and his Generals the riots were contained with 35,000 rioters killed in a single day.   It was not unreminescent of today's Middle Eastern rebellions. Through Belisarius, the Vandal kingdom of Africa was re-annexed to the empire.  He defeated the Parthnians, the Vandals.   He beat the  Ostrogoths and the Bulgars doubling the size of the Byzantine empire less than a generation after the fall of the Western Empire, but as we know, “war is hell”.
     So Procopius wrote two histories of Justinian's wars which were designed and waged to re-establish the limits of the Roman Empire….a short, pity real version and the much longer sanitized one.  There was Procopius' official history, on the one hand, and the secret one on the other with its “Secret History”, also known as Anectoda, buried in the Vatican Library for centuries, from the 6th until the 15th,  when it was "rediscovered".
     With the Holy Roman Empires' slipping grip on its inherited assets and fearing the 15^th Century assault that the church felt from Copernicus and Galileo whose discoveries had challenged the centricity of the earth as the center of all things, narcissistic Popes and embattled monarch's who depended on the church's blessing kept Procopius's secret history hidden. Why add fuel to the growing fire by telling the truth about Justinian's corruption? What good would it do to reveal that the Pope's wife, Theodora, danced naked on stage and laid covered in barley grains as geese plucked the seed from her navel and groin while brave soldiers died to protect and expand Justian and Theodora's playground?  Why reinvigorate the parallel images of Solame dancing in the court of Herod as John the Baptist awaited his fate in a dreary dungeon?
      To tell the truth in time of war, as did Col. Theodore Westhusing, is always dangerous.  Procopius had no world-wide web along which to send his lightning bolt and perhaps inoculate Belisarius.  Westhusing never had the chance, though his story is saved, as was Belisarius’  by Procopius in the book by Christian T. Miller, Blood Money. 
     Whether Justinian's gouging of General Belisarius' eyes is merely legend or fact, we cannot say, but the poet Longfellow saw in the potential threat of Belisarius as a leader of  men and repository for the facts of Justinian’s methods and motivations as reason to pen one of his most memorable poems……

Belisarius

I am poor and old and blind;

The sun burns me, and the wind

Blows through the city gate

And covers me with dust

From the Wheels of the august

Justinian the Great

It was for him I chased

The Persians o’er wild and waste,

As Generals of the East;

Night after night I lay

In their camps of yesterday;

Their forage was my feast.

For him, with sails of red, and torches at mast-head,

Piloting the great fleet,

I swept the Fric coasts

And scattered the Vandal hosts,

Like dust in a windy street.

For him I won again

The Ausonian realm and reign,

Rome and Parthenope;

And all the land has mine

From the summits of Apennine

To the shores of either sea.

For him in my feeble age,

I dared the battle rage,

To save Byzantium’s state,

When the tents of Zabergan,

Like snow-drifts overran

The road to the Golden Gate.

And for this, for this, behold!

Infirm and blind and old.

With gray, uncovered head,

Beneath the very arch

Of my triumphal march,

I stand and beg my bread!

Methinks I can still hear

Sounding distinct and near,

The Vandal monarch’s cry,

As, captive and disgraced,

With majestic step he paced,--

“All, all is Vanity!”

Ah! Vainest of all things

Is the gratitude of kings;

The plaudits of the crowd

Are but the clatter of feet

At midnight in the street,

Hollow and restless and loud.

But the bitterest disgrace

Is to see forever the face

Of the Monk of Ephesus!

The unconquerable will

This, too, can bear;--I still

Am Belisarius.

     How many Theodore Westhusings’ had Belisarius silenced at the command of Justinian in his assent?  Procopius of Ceasarea, a Greek, unlike Christian T. Miller, doesn’t say.  Remaining embedded with a General’s army had its price especially in the 5^th Century.  General Petraeus surely knows of Belisarius as would have Colonel Westhusing who studied the Greek Classics at the University  of Texas.

Col. Theodore Westhusing
and friend.

     Westhusing, a devout Catholic, scholar, historian, ethicist whose deep interest in “just warfare” unlike Petraeus, and if we are to believe Westhusing's heart-rending journal, counted the cost of “the bitterest disgrace”….of forever seeing the face “Of the Monk of Ephesus”.   Petraeus, on the other hand, having owed his life to the Senator/Surgeon from Nashville and close ally of President Bush, Dr. William  Frist, who had plugged the hole in his lung from that mysterious errant bullet received at Fort Campbell, would not be traumatized again, and especially not from the bullet of Westhusing’s poignant critique in the Green Zone.
     Now that Libyan rebels have secured the capital city of Tripoli and opened the office of the head of Libya’s feared security officer exposing communication between our CIA and Libya’s General Qaddafi, letters that show Libya to be a secret CIA renditioning site for supposed terrorists, the value of embedded human rights watchers is enhanced.  With nationalism a disguise for the treachery of family dynastic desires the life of Col. Ted Westhusing is forever honored and the official report of the circumstances of his death forever disputed.

     Now the head of our CIA, General Petraeus, who had married the West Point Commandant's daughter, like countless Vatican librarians from Procopius to the Reformation, can try to keep the real story hidden, while the world, even the Muslim world, longs for truth and freedom and light.  As the song goes, “kings and kingdoms shall all pass away, but there’s something about that name,” ….the one to which the “Monk of Ephesus”, in his best longings and for which he retreated to the solitude of Ephesus, gave compelling testimony and to whom Col. Westhusing gave his undying allegiance.  It's a name to which even significant parts of the Muslim world, as the recent rebellions attest, look for a “Great Physician” and healer of humanity’s ills while others fear that the Emperor will pluck out their eyes and leave them begging in the streets.