President Barack Obama fired Stanley Mc-Chrystal Wednesday and told Gen. David Petraeus to start running the war in Aghanistan as of that moment.
McChrystal was fired because he and his aides bad-mouthed the Obama adminstration — and the president himself — to a reporter doing an article for Rolling Stone, the anti-war, hippie magazine that specializes in four-letter words and antiestablishment rhetoric.
A better reason for firing the general was that he was stupid enough to want an article about himself in Rolling Stone — a man with no better judgment than that shouldn’t have charge of a platoon, let alone a war.
It is understood that McChrystal came to his command performance in the White House Wednesday with his resignation in hand. He should have expected it to be accepted and for his military career to end along with his command in Afghanistan. Apparently the word that the military in the United States is subservient to the civilian government never reached him. Or perhaps he thought that rule only applied to others.
Whatever the root cause of McChrystal’s ignorance of the national pecking order, President Obama had no acceptable alternative to kicking him out the door.
THE FALLOUT from this latest embarrassment to the administration will be damaging, but may be good in the long haul. McChrystal had been portraying himself as a solider-intellectual with the answer to insurgent warfare. Not.
A fresh, much more modest start, may produce tactics that succeed.
President Obama will be required to devote more of his time to resolving dilemmas there, but in doing so he also may generate a war policy that Congress and at least some of our allies will buy.
That would be a big step forward. Currently, Af-ghanistan remains a fight against al-Qaida, even though that shapeless, unnumbered group has moved to Pakistan, with branches in Africa, and can’t be defeated in Af-ghanistan, or even engag-ed there.
McChrystal’s bizarre departure allows a zero-base restart. Opening questions: (1) Is this a war we should continue fighting? (2) if so, what goals do we have? (3) are we willing to spend the blood and money that reaching them will cost?
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
A stupid general bites the dust — and options open
