House of Eratosthenes

The top U.S. war commander in Afghanistan is being called to the White House for a face-to-face meeting with President Obama after issuing an apology Tuesday for an interview in which he described the president as unprepared for their first meeting.

In the article in this week’s issue of Rolling Stone, Gen. Stanley McChrystal also said he felt betrayed and blind-sided by his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.

McChrystal’s comments are reverberating through Washington and the Pentagon after the magazine depicted him as a lone wolf on the outs with many important figures in the Obama administration.

It characterized him as unable to convince some of his own soldiers that his strategy can win the nation’s longest-running war and dejected that the president didn’t know about his commendable military record.

In Kabul on Tuesday, McChrystal issued a statement saying: “I extend my sincerest apology for this profile. It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened.”

Oh goody. An apology. Now Mister Wonderful can go back to being super-duper-awesome.

The air is getting rather thick with this isn’t it? Congressman Barton…before him, you had the “You Lie!” guy Joe Wilson…now Gen. McChrystal. All of them said something less than flattering about He Who Argues With The Dictionaries, and after some backdoor meeting they apologized and we were commanded to recall that it never happened — except perhaps to think & intone that whoever was the latest jerk to open his mouth, was a great big bozo. Nothing wrong with Obama, nosiree!

Have you ever had a boss, or a Mayor or a Governor, or anyone with any kind of authority over you, who was widely respected just because this was the level of esteem he naturally inspired in people? As opposed to, any & all other variants of thought & speech are ritually called out, pressured, disgraced, forced to recant. Good feeling to have, isn’t it.

With regard to our White House, it would be nice to have that again.

Either that, or…when someone has something negative to say and there has to be a PR strategy to counteract the effect…the PR strategy is a passive one. “Ignore it, and if there’s nothing to it, it’ll naturally fall away.”

Someone in Obama’s White House has calculated that this is not a viable plan for them. The criticism will not go away if it’s simply ignored. It will fester and get worse, so if they’re going to survive they need to exert more control over the dialogue. To such an extent that nobody is allowed to say anything unless it’s positive. They won’t win this thing unless they get the last word, all of the time. As the final page is being written, people will not think Obama is all that & a bag o’ chips, unless they are proscribed from thinking anything else. Just like a dictator in some banana republic.

I agree with whoever the person is who made this calculation. I think he or she is absolutely right.

Here’s my take:

First of all, why the hell would any soldier go near Rolling Stone? That alone fires off alarm bells.

Secondly, As much as I detest Obama, McChrystal was pretty stupid to do this and should be canned. I’ll extrapolate on this. First of all, the timing of this “brilliant calculation” will do nothing but disrupt whatever war effort we have over there. If this is a calculation, McChrystal will have his conscience cleared, but bear in mind that we have soldiers dying over there because he spouted off when he shouldn’t have. He was the architect of this COIN nonsense. If he’s canned, you seriously think this won’t disrupt the coming summer offensive in Kandahar? We’re on a tight time schedule as it is. This does not help matters.

Thirdly, I’m assuming that he will be fired. I haven’t read the article, but it’s pretty bad from what people have said. Changing theater commanders in the middle of a war, much less a military campaign, is not exactly the optimal solution.

Finally, I would say this will be one of the final nails in the coffin for this war. We’ll be out of there in a couple of years, and when that happens, we will have lost. People can put as much spin as they want, but it’ll be a loss, plain and simple.

On a side note, I think COIN is an idiotic strategy. The ROEs for it do nothing more than get our soldiers killed for no reason. The only way you will win over there is if you end up destroying them in total war. But we’ll never do that, so it’s moot to even bring that up.
- Mat | 06/22/2010 @ 09:42
A further point. I actually just finished reading the Rolling Stones article online.

I reiterate that McChrystal was very stupid to do this, and having read the article, I don’t think one can say that this was some sort of calculation. I think this guy’s kind of a loose cannon. Now, that’s fine if you’re running covert ops. In fact, from what I read here, he’s probably the type of leader that you want for that (that’s not an insult since covert ops/special forces is an entirely different universe from regular war). However, this guy is probably in way over his head with this.

I will also reemphasize that the only way we’re going to win over there is if we just turn that place into rubble. McChrystal comments on this in the article by saying that the Russians killed over a million Afghans and they didn’t win. I call bullshit on this because, let’s face it, it was massive American re-arming and supply that was essential to the mujahadeen victory. Take away the American support and there’s no reason why the Russians couldn’t have won that war. In fact, I still very much believe that they had the right idea in their conduct of this war. Yeah, I know, that makes me sound like a “big meany”, but war has no rules. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

This country does not know how to fight a war anymore, and there will be a time when that will come back to haunt us.
- Mat | 06/22/2010 @ 14:52

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Yet Another Obama Critic ApologizesTuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Yet Another Obama Critic Apologizes
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010