The deeper I dig into the bizarre actions of General Stanley McChrystal, the more disturbing the story gets. Let's start with the basics; I don't care if you are Seaman Deuce or a General of the Army, the chain of command is inviolate. Military success is built on order and discipline, and as a leader you cannot set the example of flaunting the chain of command - flaunt it, and it will flaunt you...Gen'l McChrystal has now learned that lesson. From that perspective, what was revealed in the interview with the Rolling Stone is dangerously close to direct insubordination and had to be punished.
In a country where the military is controlled by civilian rule, it is equally important that leaders not show their political bias. I remember wanting to put one of these on my "Ensignmobile" in 1980:
The very swift response from my C.O. was "no, it's not what officers do." Officers are commissioned to lead their men, not influence their political persuasion. You may not like the orders you receive from the egg-heads in Washington, they may seem inane and dangerous, but you follow them. You send your concerns back up the chain of command and pray that someone at the Pentagon or DOD can get the message to the decision makers that will change the order...you don't go public and you especially don't seek to get on the cover of the Rolling Stone! Bottom line is, McChrystal had to go and go fast.
What was not needed, however, was the public macho display put on by Obama in the Rose Garden yesterday afternoon. My guess is that Axelrod and the PR boys wanted to stage an event like this to make their guy look manly...especially after the little boy image he portrayed in that pathetic speech from the Oval Office a few days ago...I mean really, compare and contrast:
The proper way to handle the resignation/replacement of someone who has served his country for the years that Stanley McChrystal has is with a private meeting in the Oval Office and a statement issued to the press later...no public show necessary. This shows that you, as the President, are firmly in control and that it is nothing to be concerned about. McChrystal was not irreplaceable, as some wags were venting yesterday - as DeGaulle once quipped: "graveyards are full of indispensable men." But, we are at war, and McChrystal has a helluva lot of talent at killing bad guys and you might want to avail him of his services again soon. I would have recommended the Patton treatment. After a couple of insubordinate actions in Sicily during World War II, General George Patton was relieved by then Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower. He cooled his heels in England for several months as the D-Day invasion got underway (although he did provide an enormously valuable decoy that the Germans took) and then was reinserted into the campaign as the General in charge of the Third Army which ripped apart the Germans in short order.
When they are not trying to resuscitate the failure of the Obama regime with comparisons to Lincoln - "this is just like Lincoln relieving McClellan," the main stream media is trying to graft "Give 'em Hell Harry" Truman onto the rotting corpse of this failed image: "This is just like Truman relieving MacArthur." McChrystal is his own man - he is no McClellan, a peacock of a military man trimming his feathers to run for political office and afraid to engage the enemy. And he certainly is no MacArthur, who was relieved because he wanted to expand the Korean War and attack China. Here's the rub - McChrystal is Obama's general and he was following the policy. Ironically, he is being replaced by the man who could arguably be called "Bush's General," the architect of the Iraqi surge, General Petraeus ("Betrayus" if you are a liberal.)
As was pointed out in the Rolling Stone piece and elsewhere, McChrystal voted for Obama. Marc Abinder over at The Atlantic points out the McChrystal was a social liberal - he banned Fox News from his headquarters, he didn't like outward shows of Americanism like Burger King signs on the bases, and he actually believed that through our good nature we could get the Muslims to fight with us instead of against us - as Andy McCarthy observed over at the Corner:
I got in some hot water here last year for arguing that Gen. McChrystal, for all his undeniable valor, is a progressive big-thinker who has been conducting a sociology experiment in Islamic nation-building. It's a flawed experiment that assumes Afghan Muslims will side with us — i.e., the Westerners their clerical authorities tell them are infidel invaders and occupiers — against their fellow Afghan Muslims.
Nothing in the ensuing months changes my mind. To the contrary, what I've seen lately indicates that, while our troops are imperiled under strait-jacketing rules of engagement imposed by Gen. McChrystal to avoid offending Afghans, Christian missionaries have been suspended for preaching (proselytism for any belief-system other than Islam is illegal in Afghanistan). I've seen Asia News's report that Afghan converts to Christianity have been sentenced to death for apostasy. All this, moreover, is happening under the new constitution we helped write, which (as the State Department bragged in 2004) enshrines sharia as Afghanistan's fundamental law. That is, the Afghan Muslim population our troops are fighting and dying to protect has institutionalized the persecution of other populations (when the said Muslims are not otherwise busy killing each other).
For me, the image of the man that emerges is someone that is very deeply conflicted. On the one hand, he IS the fearless spec ops warrior who doesn't shy away from engaging the enemy himself, on the other, he is apparently a dyed in the wool liberal who really believes that if we could just talk to each other, we'll be singing "Kumbaya" together before the night's out. This latter part of his split personality does explain the Rolling Stone as the medium for his message. This conflict is creating chaos on the ground in Afghanistan, as noted imbedded journalists like Michael Yon (who McChrystal banned from the Afghan theater) have pointed out.
But I don't care how many generals or stars you throw at Afghanistan, you are going to get nowhere if you announce ahead of time your departure date! For a military man, this has to be the greatest conflict. You are carrying out the orders of your commanders and sending troopers into places where they will get killed knowing that in a year's time, you will be pulling out. This inane policy is incredibly corrosive to morale - who the hell would want to fight if you know that if you can just stay alive till next July you can go home?
If one good thing emerges from this whole debacle, perhaps it will be a re-thinking of our entire Afghan strategy. Some years ago, my company was not selected by the city to redevelop a small section of riverfront downtown..."best deal we never did," I like to quip. After studying the plan for the team that was selected, I concluded that it was financially impossible to accomplish. After about a year of wrangling between the city and the selectee, I was asked back to the table. Incredibly, I was asked to execute their plan! I politely refused and sadly, that area to this day, is still floundering. You can't execute a flawed strategy, no matter how brilliant you are! I am not comparing myself to General Petraeus who I have utmost respect for, merely making the analogy, that if the plan is broken, no amount of genius is going to turn it around. As General Honore likes to say, "you can't fix stupid."
I hope and pray for our men, that Petraeus's orders are to evaluate the current situation and strategy and to report back on what he needs. I have spelled out my recommended strategy earlier on these pages in a piece titled "Beyond Afghanistan," and perhaps I will be lucky enough to get a read from the good General. Short version is this - a) Iraq and Afghanistan are very different and thus require very different strategies b) small, lethal footprint is the way to go. In the end, we can not afford to continue bleeding in the mountains of Afghanistan. The lives and the money aren't worth it when the political will for victory does not exist.
We have arrived at this spot because of the neglect and failure of our leadership. They selected "their man" to lead the renewed fight in Afghanistan then fumbled and mumbled for months while men died as their academic team pondered and attempted to triangulate the general's requests. In the end, McChrystal was left 10,000 men short of his request and had a date stamp put on the mission...an impossible task that our American GI knows too well. Though it would be impossible for Obama's people to understand this, because we can be sure he views the men that serve voluntarily with derision - after all they are a bunch of bitter clingers aren't they - but as Kipling observed about his beloved Tommies, you bet that the GI sees:
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!