Exclusive: How to Turn McChrystal’s Insubordination into a Positive
by PAM MEISTER
June 23, 2010
There’s been a lot of hooh hah over the interview of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in the new edition of Rolling Stone magazine. In it, there are a few unflattering comments made about the Obama administration that has the White House angry enough to recall the general from Afghanistan for a special meeting on Wednesday – likely in order to call him out on the carpet. And, perhaps, to give him his pink slip.
The media, of course, love a scandal and have been all over the story. Yes, it’s scandalous that an active duty general, the one in charge of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, has even uttered one word publicly against his Commander in Chief. But as Lachlan Markay, writing for Newsbusters, points out, active duty generals who spoke out against the Bush administration’s wartime policy were “portrayed as courageous whistleblowers” and
Instead of going on to examine the apparent problems with a military chain of command in which policymakers are criticized, the Times, the Globe, and many other media outlets used critiques from officers both named and anonymous to question the effectiveness and wisdom of American military policy.
McChrystal, however, is being raked over the coals by talking heads and the calls for him to resign are growing throughout the punditocracy. It’s interesting to see the difference in “mainstream” media attitude when liberals are in the White House.
But anyone who has read the entire article could see that the most damning remarks are made by McChrystal’s aides, not the man himself. When joking about how to dismiss Vice President Joe Biden with a one-liner during an upcoming speech, an adviser says, “Biden? Did you say: Bite Me?” And,
In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk s*** about many of Obama’s top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a “clown” who remains “stuck in 1985.”
And of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan,
“The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal,” says a member of the general’s team. “Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He’s a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can’t just have someone yanking on s***.”
Perhaps the most damning paragraph is this one:
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his f***** war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."
Again, comments from an aide, not McChrystal. But the damage is done and the White House is understandably upset. (As of this writing, the Drudge Report claims Joe Klein told Rick Sanchez on CNN that McChrystal has already submitted his resignation.) Should the decision made to fire him, no one would really be surprised.
What you won’t hear is that much of the article paints McChrystal himself in an unflattering light, highlighting his various exploits as a cadet at West Point (like downing an entire case of beer he hid in his bathroom) and points out that he “wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a serious underachievement for a man widely regarded as brilliant.” It also makes mention of McChrystal’s role in creating the impression that Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former NFL player who joined the Rangers, was killed by the Taliban rather than in a friendly fire accident – something which, when it came out, caused much embarrassment for the Bush administration.
In other words, the article seems to be more of a hit piece on McChrystal than it is one on Obama or his administration. As Victor Davis Hanson points out at The Corner,
As an aside, surely officers in Afghanistan should know that the purpose of Rolling Stone magazine is not to emphasize either their competency or their insight. And as a general rule, anytime a liberal journalist wishes to empathize with a frustrated officer, it is usually to exaggerate the officer’s unhappiness and use it for his own political purposes, which rarely if ever are those of the military. If an officer cannot figure out Rolling Stone, how can he understand the Taliban?
Should McChrystal – and his aides – have said what they did in that Rolling Stone interview? Despite a source saying McChrystal always talks this way and that “he had great disdain, as he said, for anyone… ‘in a suit,’” surely McChrystal must have known that when the article became public he’d land himself in the soup. And it’s doubtful that his aides would have spoken so freely without the boss’s green light.
The other question is, were the comments made because perhaps McChrystal and his staff felt it was the only way to highlight problems with how the war effort in Afghanistan is progressing? It’s doubtful we’ll ever know, unless McChrystal decides to someday pen his memoirs. But Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post says that we shouldn’t be blaming McChrystal:
For months [there have been] deep divisions between …military and civilian aides over how to implement the counterinsurgency strategy he announced last December. The divide has made it practically impossible to fashion a coherent politico-military plan, led to frequent disputes over tactics and contributed to a sharp deterioration in the administration’s relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The virtue of the Rolling Stone article is that [the White House] may finally have to confront the trouble. But the dismissal of McChrystal would be the wrong outcome. It could spell disaster for the military campaign he is now overseeing in southern Afghanistan, and it would reward those in the administration who have been trying to undermine him, including through media leaks of their own.
Insubordination aside, the Rolling Stone article highlights a crucial problem facing the Obama administration: what to do about Afghanistan. Until this administration was installed in the White House, all the American people heard was how Iraq was the wrong war and it was taking away precious resources from Afghanistan. Now the focus is on Afghanistan and things are going poorly. Despite the new focus and 30,000 fresh troops, there hasn’t been a breakthrough and the July 2011 deadline for the already announced withdrawal will be here before we know it. Byron York notes that this situation is not being helped by McChrystal’s “devotion to unreasonably restrictive rules of engagement that are resulting in the unnecessary deaths of American and coalition forces.” Why should our men and women in uniform die for what seems to be becoming a lost cause?
Will the longest war in American history turn into the Obama administration’s Vietnam? For the sake of everyone involved, it’s time to get serious. It’s not enough to want to withdraw in order to appease one’s political base – it’s important to want to win in order to secure our national security interests. Whether winning is the actual goal remains to be seen.
Pam Meister's current interest in politics and world events stems from the events of 9/11, when she made a conscious decision to contribute to the ongoing debate surrounding America's soverignty and foreign policy. Other samples of her writing can be seen at American Thinker, Pajamas Media, and her personal blog. Pam is also a former radio broadcaster, and has worked in both the publishing and healthcare industries.
blog comments powered by Disqus