This whole saga is hilarious for me - I live in South Africa. Our president was involved in a rape case just before he was elected. He got the charges dropped because of a mysterious set of audio recordings that were classified yet somehow proved him entirely innocent. Trouble is, nobody has yet been able to get hold of these recordings even under subpoena from the constitutional courts. The guy also has a number of wives, was involved in a number of arms deals, and is currently building a $30 million house in the middle of nowhere and having a billion dollar freeway project begun to make sure he can get to his house in style. We also have a 'textbook fiasco' where a large portion of public schools in a province did not receive textbooks at all. Nobody in the education accepts blame or will step down over this. The monopoly government controlled electricity provider is increasing electricity charges by over 15% per year and is still losing money by paying out massive bonuses to employees. We have had illegal strikes resulting in multiple deaths caused by police shooting fleeing strikers in the back as they ran away. Nobody in government has stepped down over any of this.

This is common in many democracies across the world.

The fact that someone in your government is forced to step down over something as basic as having an affair (our president has had a number of them over the last 4 years) shows that USA is still pretty high up as far as government morals go. Bravo!

Politicians in the USA have higher standards for civil servants than they do for themselves. There are numerous elected officials that have had multiple affairs, multiple convictions for some serious crimes, and/or very questionable ethic violations, but they'll happily keep their job.

True enough, I concede the point... politicians are probably just as corrupt anywhere you go.

CIA director is an easy target, and it's more than possible that Petraeus was targeted for some other reason and the affair was a useful pretext for taking him down. It wouldn't affect a president though. Bill Clinton only became more popular once the Republicans tried to remove him from office over an affair he had with a White House intern.

The issue is (highlighted on Charlie Rose show) that CIA employees have a code of conduct that requires disclosing any compromising situations immediately to their supervisors, colleagues, etc., and DP did not do that.

So it would be a double standard for management, etc., and he would have been known to have broken the code of conduct. Not broken it with the affair, but broken it by not disclosing a compromising situation.

Yup, much like Clinton was in hot water not because of his affair but because he lied bald-faced about it.

Having an affair opens yourself to blackmail, and given he is the top spy this is considered a serious offence. That's the thinking, anyway. There might also be an ethical code which was broken, which is a fireable offence.

The "susceptible to blackmail" argument is a justification and easy excuse. That is the exact same argument people used to keep gays out of the military for years.

Not to mention, it was leaked to the media, everyone already knows about it. How exactly could that be used to blackmail someone if the entire world already knows about it?

During the time when the affair was secret, Petraeus was vulnerable to blackmail. His failure to recognize that and alert his superiors demonstrates that can't be trusted.

Do you really think he would allow himself to be blackmailed rather than tell the blackmailer to go ahead and go public with the information? He admitted the affair to the FBI when initially questioned about the emails.

I suppose you think Clinton should have resigned (instead of lying about the affair, which made everything worse)?

What I think is irrelevant. The OP asked about the blackmail justification for resigning and my point was that in the context of the security regulations as they exist, having your affair exposed doesn't eliminate the need to resign. The rules as written require you to (1) not have affairs and (2) tell your superiors immediately if you break (1).

Now, maybe you think those rules are stupid. Frankly, I think some of them don't make a lot of sense (or at least fail a cost/benefit analysis), but I don't make the rules. Petreus agreed to follow those rules. If he didn't like them, he could have refused the job. Or he could have worked to change them. But he didn't. So he has to live by them. And he failed to do that.

I don't think we know enough about exactly what happened to determine if he broke the rules or not. People around him in Washington may have known about this for a long time before it went public.

But he's publicly admitted to having an affair. So we know he had an affair. Because he told us.

Hard to know what a person might do in that situation, hence the regulations.

For a lot of these military and intelligence positions, it is best to err in the direction of caution.

Also, the people involved have probably learned from painful experience that traditional institutional rules are usually better guides than they sometimes appear to be at the moment of decision.

I doubt that the top spy was fired for not sharing his secrets.

If anything I would guess that he was fired for allowing his secret to leak (which means incompetency).

Realistically though, all that scandal is just a cover for real reason why Petraeus was fired - probably something like policy disagreement with superiors.

I suspect it's the military ethical code violation that really did it. People in the military take that seriously, the higher up you are, the more serious it is. I thought the blackmail/office politics thing at first myself.

He was no longer in the military. He retired from the army a week before being sworn in as CIA director.

General Petraeus is still in the military. He's just retired -- he didn't resign his commission. The distinction between the two is that Petraeus continues to earn military pay, may be recalled to active duty, and is legally still an officer in the Army at the same permanent rank (four-star General) that he retired at. This is also the case for almost any living retired general you can think of, including Colin Powell, Anthony Zinni, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Tommy Franks. Anyone who has served in the military for 20 years is eligible for retirement, though, it's not just for generals.

Actually leaving the military, if you're an officer, requires resigning your commission. For enlisted, one generally signs up for a limited term of enlistment, and is out of the military at the end of that enlistment unless they choose to reenlist. Once an enlisted servicemember reaches 20 years of service, they become eligible to retire at their current rank as well.

Career military men are military men for life, so what they think in their head and what their military friends and colleagues think is going to remain important regardless of the nuances of their service status.

It shows weakness in character to hold a public post as powerful as his.

> I'm still confused about this whole thing. What did he do that he needed to resign for?

I'm not an American and I don't live in the States, but from what I can tell a bigger f*ck-up was that Mrs. Broadwell gained access to Petraeus's personal email account. God only knows (or in this case the FBI) what was in there, but I suspect it was not only about baseball newsletters and photos with Petraeus's nephews and kids. This coming from the man that heads the CIA is a major no-no, IMHO.

Presumably the head of the CIA is capable of keeping his work and personal email accounts separate.

Not having affairs is a condition for keeping high level security clearances. Without a clearance, the director of the CIA cannot properly do his job, so he had to resign.

It's more about a matter of trust than having sex with someone that isn't your spouse. So, it's not really the affair but more about keeping a secret about the affair.

No, that just made it worse. He was subject to personal character standards.

Well, it opens him up to blackmail, and I'm sure that the directory of the CIA would be a juicy target if an opposing spy agency had this info (prior to it becoming public).

You're not alone. David Simon (journalist, author, and creator of The Wire) wrote about this:

http://davidsimon.com/stray-penises-and-politicos/