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US General McChrystal Apologizes for Magazine Remarks
WASHINGTON — US commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal was ordered to the White House to personally explain his criticism of the president and his senior advisers, a top US official said.
In this May 10, 2010 file photo, Commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Eikenberry at the White House. An article out this week in "Rolling Stone" magazine depicts Gen. Stanley McChrystal as a lone wolf on the outs with many important figures in the Obama administration and unable to convince even some of his own soldiers that his strategy can win the war. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak) "McChrystal
has been directed to attend (Wednesday's) monthly meeting on
Afghanistan and Pakistan in person" rather than appear in a secure
satellite teleconference "to explain to the Pentagon and the commander
in chief his quotes in the piece about his colleagues," a White House
official told AFP.
The leading military commander in Afghanistan apologized late Monday for published remarks to a US magazine in which he and senior aides mock and criticize top American officials -- including President Barack Obama.
Tensions between General Stanley McChrystal and the White House are on full display in the unflattering article in Rolling Stone, although the general said in a statement late Monday that it was all a mistake.
"I extend my sincerest apology for this profile," McChrystal said in a statement issued hours after the article entitled "The Runaway General" was released.
"It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened."
McChrystal, a former special operations chief, usually speaks cautiously in public and has enjoyed mostly sympathetic US media coverage since he took over the NATO-led force last year.
But the Rolling Stone article appeared to catch him and his staff in unguarded moments.
In the profile, McChrystal jokes sarcastically about preparing to answer a question referring to Vice President Joe Biden, known as a skeptic of the commander's war strategy and imagined ways of "dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner."
"'Are you asking about Vice President Biden?' McChrystal says with a laugh. 'Who's that?'" the article quotes him as saying.
"'Biden?' suggests a top adviser. 'Did you say: Bite Me?'"
An unnamed adviser to McChrystal also says in the article that the general came away unimpressed after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office a year ago.
"It was a 10-minute photo op," the general's adviser says.
"Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was... he didn't seem very engaged.
"The boss was pretty disappointed," says the adviser.
McChrystal tells the magazine that he felt "betrayed" by the US ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, in a White House debate over war strategy last year.
Referring to a leaked internal memo from Eikenberry that questioned McChrystal's request for more troops, the commander suggested the ambassador had tried to protect himself for history's sake.
"Here's one that covers his flank for the history books," McChrystal tells Rolling Stone.
"Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so.'"
Eikenberry, himself a former commander in Afghanistan, had written to the White House saying Afghan President Hamid Karzai was an unreliable partner and that a surge of troops could draw the United States into a open-ended quagmire.
The article is likely to exacerbate tensions between the US command in Afghanistan and the White House.
McChrystal already received a dressing down from Obama after giving a speech last summer in which he appeared to criticize Biden's argument in favor of fewer troops in Afghanistan.
As an Afghanistan strategy review was beginning, McChrystal had requested tens of thousands of reinforcements and although Obama in the end granted most of what he had asked for, the strategy review was a difficult time, the general told the magazine.
"I found that time painful," McChrystal says. "I was selling an unsellable position."
The profile argued that McChrystal has pushed through his vision of how to fight the war, sidelining White House and State Department heavyweights along the way.
His aides are portrayed as intensely loyal to McChrystal while dismissive of the White House and those who question their commander's approach.
One aide calls the national security adviser, Jim Jones, a retired general, a "clown" who is "stuck in 1985."
One unnamed senior military official speculates that yet another surge of US forces could be requested "if we see success here."
But his own troops voice doubts about the war and new rules limiting the use of force at a meeting with McChrystal at a combat outpost near Kandahar city, according to the magazine.
One sergeant tells him: "Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we're losing, sir."
McChrystal also complains about a dinner with an unnamed French minister during a visit to France in April.
In a hotel room in Paris getting ready for a dinner with the French official, McChrystal says: "How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?"
He also derides the hard-charging top US envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke.
"Oh, not another email from Holbrooke," McChrystal says, looking at his messages on a mobile phone. "I don't even want to open it."
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Show AllLet me recommend the following article:
The Global War on Tribes
By Zoltan Grossman
April 13, 2010
The so-called "Global War on Terror" is quickly growing outside the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan, into new battlegrounds in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and beyond. The Pentagon is vastly increasing missile and gunship attacks, Special Forces raids, and proxy invasions--all in the name of combating "Islamist terrorism." Yet within all five countries, the main targets of the wars are predominantly "tribal regions," and the old frontier language of Indian-fighting is becoming the lexicon of 21st-century counterinsurgency. The "Global War on Terror" is fast morphing into a "Global War on Tribes."
Tribal regions are local areas where tribes are the dominant form of social organization, and tribal identities often trump state, ethnic, and even religious identities. Tribal peoples have a strongly localized orientation, tied to a particular place. Their traditional societies are based on a common culture, dialect, and kinship ties (through single or multiple clans). Although they are tribal peoples, they are not necessarily Indigenous peoples--who generally follow nature-centered spiritual and cultural systems. Nearly all tribal communities in the Middle East and Central Asia have been Islamicized or Christianized, but they still retain their ancient social bonds.
...
Western society tends to portray tribes as primitive, backward peoples, and views "tribalism" as merely ignorant villagers brutally acting in their narrow self-interest. Colonial authorities often diminished the status of ethnic nations by defining them as "tribes," and employed divide-and-conquer strategies to pit them against each other. Yet in some regions, a local tribal identity may be more inclusive of human differences than larger-scale ethnic or religious identities. For example, some Iraqi tribes include both Sunni and Shi'a Muslims, and help to transcend the tense sectarian divide. Within some tribes around the world, more than one language or dialect may be spoken. Tribal identities and boundaries are not simply fixed in the past-they can be fluid and dynamic.
...
Nothing New
If the Global War on Tribes is as old as European colonialism, in the United States it is as old as the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. In U.S. foreign policy, we can trace it back to the Vietnam War (including the tribal highlands of South Vietnam and Laos), and farther back to the Philippine-American War and the Indian Wars. In his classic Facing West: the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building, Richard Drinnon connects the colonization of Native American nations in the West to U.S. overseas expansion into the Philippines and Vietnam, which used the identical rhetoric of insurgent territory as hostile "Indian Country."
...
One of the hallmarks of American colonization is to pit favored tribes and ethnic nations against the national security threat of the moment- Crow against Lakota, Igorot against Filipino, Montagnard against Vietnamese, Hmong against Lao, Miskito against Nicaraguan, Kurd against Arab. When the minority tribal allies (with their very real grievances) are no longer needed, Washington quickly abandons its defense of their "human rights." We love 'em, we use 'em, and then we dump 'em. These divide-and-conquer strategies are being revived from Pakistan to Yemen, as the Pentagon arms tribal militias to do its bidding-often against other tribes.
The Global War on Tribes can be traced even farther back in history, to its roots in Europe--including the English colonization of Celtic tribal lands, the mass burning of women who kept tribal healing practices alive, and the suppression of peasant rebellions emerging from local clan resistance (as shown by Carolyn Merchant in her The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution). Perhaps the ultimate model is the Roman Empire, which itself emerged from three early tribes in Rome (the word "tribe" comes from the Latin for "three"), and waged wars against numerous so-called "barbarian" tribes.
...
Tribal resistance against Western intervention and corporate globalization take different forms in different countries. In Pakistan and Iraq, tribes may fight under the green banner of political Islamism. In India and Peru, some tribal peoples have fought under the red flag of Maoist rural insurgent armies. In Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico, they have coalesced within their own self-defined indigenist movements, which have effectively intersected with socialist and environmental movements.
...
Reasons for War
Whether in Mexico, India, Iraq, or the United States and Canada, the Global War on Tribes has some common characteristics. First, the war is most blatantly being waged to steal the natural resources under tribal lands. The rugged, inaccessible terrain that prevented colonial powers from eliminating tribal societies also made accessing minerals, oil, timber and other resources more difficult--so (acre for acre) more of the resources are now left on tribal lands than on more accessible lands.
...
Second, the Global War on Tribes is a campaign against the very existence of tribal regions that are not under centralized state control. The tribal regions still retain forms of social organization that has not been solely determined by capitalism. In her anthology Paradigm Wars, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, comments that "promoters of economic globalization, the neocolonizers, use the overwhelming pressure of homogenization to teach us that indigenous political, economic and cultural systems are obstacles to their 'progress.'" (p. 14).
The point is not that all tribal peoples pose an egalitarian alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Some (such as Indigenous peoples) certainly do have strong egalitarian principles, but many other tribal peoples --such as in the new conflict zones--certainly do not (particularly toward women). The salient point is not that all tribal cultures are paradise, but that they are not capitalist, and neoliberal capitalism cannot stand anything other than Total Control.
...
http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/154-general/48954-the-global-war-on-tribes.html
Good article. Important insights here for understanding this complex picture, especially that closing sentence: "The salient point is not that all tribal cultures are paradise, but that they are not capitalist, and neoliberal capitalism cannot stand anything other than Total Control."
Roots of antipathy towards tribalism are at the heart of the Enlightenment. Fundamental to the Enlightenment is Deism, the Biblical interpretation whereby assumed is God promises humanity a return to the earthly Paradise. Human history is the record of this return. Eating of the fruit of knowledge, Eve and Adam choose to live by their wits without commensurate knowledge. Human history is the chronicle of gaining the knowledge whereby humanity returns to Paradise.
Like the animals, Eve and Adam lived in harmony with the laws of nature by conforming with their unthinking passionate instincts. Choosing to live by knowledge, it is necessary to consciously identify the laws of nature. To do so constitutes science, rendering the scientists the true priests, supplanting the false priests of the Church, who promote false conceptions of nature's laws.
In this process of ever expanding understanding of nature, tribes evolve as groups understand different portions of the whole. As humans understand ever greater portions of nature's laws, however, tribal identity expands to an ultimate universal understanding of all of the laws of nature shared by all humanity. Created, then, is the "tribe" of humanity. Living in perfect harmony with nature, a new earthly Eden of peace and harmony is achieved.
Way stations along the path toward this ultimate end, limited tribes must be eliminated in order to foster the path of history. Thus it is tribalism as we understand it is "bad." Globalization is the manifestation of this idea, an economic integration of humanity, breaking down ethnic and political identities. Francis Fukuyama manifests this in his claim to "The End of History."
Resurgent tribalism in national identity in response to immigration and the failure of economic globalization, shows the Enlightenment conception to be dying. Environmental economics is a further indication of the decline in the Enlightenment. Embracing entropy, environmentalists deny the possibility of a cornucopia of the "Land of Plenty." Now the concept of infinite "growth" fundamental to modern economics is rejected.
Evocative as it is of the Enlightenment understanding of human history as a return to the Biblical "The Land of Plenty," rejected with it is the Enlightenment ideal. Concurrent with this decline is a decline in a faith in the rational ideal of science. Within the Enlightenment conception, science is as much a Biblical theology as Protestantism or Catholicism. That faith is eroding as much as church attendance figures indicate is the faith in traditional religion.
It is for these reasons I believe the Enlightenment is coming to an end, with no alternative apparent. Because no alternative is apparent, I am scared, very scared.
Fear not, philandrel. "Fear is the mind killer" (Frank Herbert); "There is nothing to fear but fear itself (FDR); "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love." (I John 4:18)
Indeed multiple cataclysmic crises seem to be accelerating and converging rapidly---financial, political, military, AND ecological---toward a near certain apocalypse. Yet what seems apocalyptic may not necessarily mean mass physical destruction, but rather the death of an unsustainable order or system, as in the original Greek meaning of the word, "revelation" or "uncovering of what is hidden".
These crises may well be evidence of a momentous passage, possibly the Mayan passage to a new Earth beginning in the Solsitce 2012, the end of a time, or time itself, but not necessarily the end of life as we know it. Be glad to live in such interesting times.
Yeah, sure. Internationally, following the lead of the United States, governments have systematically wiped out the humanities. Again, arguably, this is because the humanities present alternatives to the existing neoclassical economics. Perceiving humanity to have returned to the earthly paradise of Fukuyama's End of History, the criticisms of the humanists are a corruption endangering human perfection. Success of this strangulation of the humanities has been so successful, there are no new ideas, only rehashing of old ideas. Just as with Socrates, the humanities have been executed for the crime of "corrupting the youth." Just as this exhibited the foolishness of the citizens of ancient Athens, our execution of the humanities for the crime of "corrupting the youth" exhibits the foolishness of the citizens of modern society.
Bah, Humbug . . . .
This process of "dis-integration" is as necessary to human evolution as the falling of leaves and withering of fowers in an approaching Autumn chill. The dying MUST die before any renewal can occur.
We are witnessing Mother Earth's dynamic process of rebirth applied to ourselves.
One only need embrace the natural order of things and the "fear factor" dissapates into the ether.
If you are"very scared", please accept an invitation to check the website of Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust.
If you are"very scared", please accept an invitation to check the website of Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust.
"Some (such as Indigenous peoples) certainly do have strong egalitarian principles, but many other tribal peoples --such as in the new conflict zones--certainly do not (particularly toward women)."
This essay on the War on Tribalism is absolutely correct except for the above qoute.
On page 163 of "Growing up Bin Laden" the Afghan Mullah tells Omar Bin Laden "That no man is below another". Saying even the King of Saudi Arabia is not above any other man ( I grant it is only equitable among males).
Thanks, mcoyote. This seemed off-topic at first, but it goes to the essence of understanding empire and its maddening militarism, especially that last line: "neoliberal capitalism cannot stand anything other than Total Control."
The posted article reveals the same vacuous (un)consciousness and eerie parallels to escalation in Vietnam here: "One unnamed senior military official speculates that yet another surge of US forces could be requested "if we see success here... [McChrystal's] own troops voice doubts about the war and new rules limiting the use of force..."
To a boy (general or capitalist) with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Escalation of tribal conflict (in war and politics) ensures eternal conflict, profit, and total control.
But this unprecedented airing of laundry is a sure sign that the wheels are coming off. For good reason Afghanistan is known as "the graveyard of empires." "This time it's different" (regarding war or finance) shows profound ignorance of history, and American exceptionalism has its limits.
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold... " ("The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, 1921)
"What me worry? I know who I work for and it ain't Obama nor the American people. I work for the MIC!"
Gen McChrystal
McChrystal is an agent (I will use the word agent) working for Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.....They decided on Viet Nam! They decided to support the Project for a New American Century. They decided to form a New World Order. They decided that a Pearl Harbor Type Attack was necessary to gain the support of the American People. (9/11 Attacks) They decided that the murder of millions of innocent people was "Collateral Damage".
Obama is a puppet of The Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderberg Club.....He has no power!
McChrystal spoke his leaders' truth!
Obama has no balls, otherwise he would fire the PUNK, Death Squad McChrystal.
If this does not constitute insubordination of the commander-in-chief I don't know what will be. McChrystal has consistently taken over policy making/announcing from the Obama administration as I have pointed out here on several occasions. A General who disagrees with the strategy/policy of his commander-in-chief should step down, should he not?
Let's see if Mr. Obama has the guts now to fire a General who has consistently and repeatedly undermined his authority. If Gates and Hillary are co-underminers they must be fired also. This is not merely a "teaching moment". It is a crucial watershed in the governance of our state. Who is in charge? The military or the non-military? The Pentagon or White House/Congress?
My hunch is that it will all be papered over. My hunch is that most Republican Representatives and Senators will take the side of McChrystal after mumbling that his language was poorly chosen.
"Let's see if Mr. Obama has the guts now to fire a General who has consistently and repeatedly undermined his authority. "
Why get caught up in the gossip bullshit? All this stuff is just put out to keep us from the REAL issue. Let's see if Mr. Obama has the guts to do the right thing and get the US out of this imperialist game. End the goddamn imperialist wars. That's what we should be calling for, rather than worrying about the relationship between the Pres and the Generals.
I do not remember that you placed a posting on this website in the spring of 2008 when I was lambasted here for having had the audacity to call candidate Obama an imperialist who was going to start his own wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I am not a newcomer on the stage of calling for an end to our nations imperialist wars hence I do not need your condescending silly lecture.
Get Fucking REAL Crowsnest!
These assorted clowns are ALL just interchangeable parts in the MIGC and are answerable only to the Plutocrats who run this dysfunctional DisneyLand for their own amusement.
"Teaching Moment"... my ass - read Chomski's "Understanding Power" and then come back to school.
Get fucking awake GM and learn to recognize sarcasm. Unfortunately you drown in your wild anti-revolutionary language. In which school have you learned this drivel?
I have now carefully re-read the Rolling Stone article which prompts me to apologize to you gold mansacks and Struggle. Perhaps general McChrystal is contemptuous of the persons in Article 88 but he has not used any "contemptuous words" in the article. I agree that there are far more important matters on the war issues than this "tempest in a teapot". Please accept my apologies.
Oh my, another ass-covering apology by someone actually saying what he means.
Things seem to be getting a little shaky for the people in charge of this fiasco. When bickering sets in then it is a clear sign that things are not going well on the good ship USS Barack Obama. If McChrystal has little respect for Obama one has to wonder how much faith Obama now has in his ever optimistic generals. It would appear that the expression from Vietnam is just as misleading today as it was those many years ago since one can hardly state today with any credibility that the United States is supposedly seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in Afghanistan [or in Iraq as well as in Pakistan].
Cut off all funding, end these wars now,
You can plainly see, that the Pentagon thinks they run Washington, and the question is ,,, do they???
They have all served our country well, bring them home, so they can write the memoirs of the glory days of war, from their reclining chairs in the command centers of their own living rooms.
Death and destruction have become all to easy for them as a daily act of things to do.
They have no reality base for peace.
The never ending war is all they know.
Bornfreemen
I must disagree with your assertion that "they have all served our country well." On the contrary, what the vast majority in the military have done is to go along with the program instead of speaking out against US imperialism.
It's inevitable that all the "key players" in this asinine charade of a "war" are going to find one another absurd and reprehensible fools. When there is absolutely no sane justification for continuing, not to even mention ever starting in the first place, a war that cannot be "won" and serves no purpose beyond the consolidation of transnational corporatist interests as they intersect with the imperatives of empire, then eventually the perpetrators of this massive crime against humanity are going to be at each other's throats.
May they all proceed to take turns ripping out said throats. Our worthless, useless Congress isn't going to stop any of these barbaric wars, we have no peace movement, most Americans couldn't give less of a shit about them one way or another, so probably our only hope, if any exists, is for McChrystal to bad mouth Obama and Biden, Holbrooke and Eikenberry, and for them to call him on the carpet forcing an apology if he wants to keep his murderous job, and all of them to ultimately self-destruct. Let us pray. Every one of them should be brought before a war crimes tribunal at The Hague, but that's as likely as the Gulf of Mexico magically cleansing itself on the order of President Obaminable, and BP suddenly joining forces with Greenpeace.
Maybe a meteor the size of a volkswagen beetle will hit the white house during their big meeting. One can fantasize...
So according to McKKKrystal, Bush & Cheney are professional war criminals, while Obama and Biden are amateur war criminals.
How loathsome military people and their attempts at one-liners are. At least Gen. Turgidson was really entertaining.
I worked as a civilian for the Navy at one time. We had a captain who constantly related ANECDOTES to us, always telling us that he was about to present an ANALOGY. This is anecdotally illustrative of the level of intellect we have in command of our military.
Then you've surely heard of the General that was so stupid even the other Generals noticed.
The pentagon and the political hacks who masquerade as generals have been trying to manipulate policy since O took office. McChrystal needs to be fired.
Truman fired MacArthur for the same conduct, and MacArthur actually knew how to win a war. It's no loss to get rid of a general who is leading the country into defeat.
Of course, general Westmoreland's ... OOPS ... I mean general McChrystal's ace in the hole is that O is probably too much of a punk to fire him.
Also, I apologize to Westmoreland for the comparison. The current fools in the pentagon have taken much more time and money to get us to the same place that Westmoreland did.
This might be a good time for some house cleaning at the pentagon. We need generals, not politicians. Mullen and Betrayus should be the next to go.
So your point is that we should definitely WIN in Afghanistan, get some good generals who will follow orders from our masterful commander in chief? You haven't yet advanced beyond naughty military leaders failing to obey the chain of command, failing to acknowledge their civilian authorities, who are obviously pursuing the proper path in Afghanistan? Don't you get it that BOTH our political and military class are colluding in a major war crime here? We need a "house cleaning" on EVERY level of this criminal government, not just at the Pentagon.
Actually, I agree with all of your substantive points about the war. We never should have invaded, and we should get out as soon as possible. We shouldn't be looking for "victory," whatever that is, because America is wearing the black hat in this adventure.
My point was that given the disaster called The War on Terror, the last thing we need are jackasses like McChrystal trying to make policy. You shouldn't interpret anything I say as support for O's warmongering.
Caleb Abell
I have my doubts that taking MacArthur's suggestion of dropping an atomic bomb in Korea would have been the best way of "winning" the war in that country in the early 1950s [though war, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq, was never declared by the only governmental body that can do that and that would have been Congress].
Congress is required to declare war. The constitution says nothing about invasions and occupations. I guess it all depends on how you define what "is" means and what you mean by "war". Like what "is" "war"?
The constitution is a dead letter, has been for decades.
No doubt I poorly worded my original comment, because you are not the only one to misinterpret it.
My point wasn't that MacArthur was right in Korea (the comment about winning wars referred to world war II, not Korea). The point was that Truman at least had the balls to fire an insubordinate general in the middle of a war, even a general that was extremely popular. Let's see what Obama does. Maybe he will be bipartisan and let McChrystal kick him in the nuts again (i.e. business as usual).
I'm sorry, but I simply can't believe Obama was so ignorant of McChrystal that he *didn't* know about the Tillman fraud and the way McChrystal ran a torture camp. Anyone who read the papers or was capable of two minutes' worth of Googling knew that much.
If Obama really is that ignorant of things, he shouldn't be President. If he knew, then he's, well, very much in line with all the other moral illiterates who've occupied the Oval Office in my lifetime.
McChrystal is a loose canon. The lives of our soldiers and our taxpayers pay.
You might want to review who "our" is.
Those soldiers you speak of are corporate stormtroopers who's only function is to protect the financial interests of big business.
It's a tribute to our national propaganda machine that most of the kids who go into the military have been convinced they are fighting for their country.
Perhaps when they are in a particular campaign, instead of giving them cute little colored ribbons to put on their uniforms, they should get ribbons with the logo of the corporation they are fighting for. For example, the Iraq veterans could get a little Exxon logo to pin to their chest, the Afghan veterans could get the logo of the gas company that will control the pipeline, etc. It would be a better fit with our policy of Truth in Advertising.
That is a brilliant idea Caleb.
Instead of ribbons and medals, why not award our troops X number of shares for bravery and valor. To hell with the flashy brass.
Ya know, some bonus shares for the family in case they become another one of the honored dead. Why the hell not? We all know it ain't about American security, so let's just cut to the chase.
If only the soldiers could be made aware of this. If only we could make those about to enlist understand this.
McChystal is not the only loose cannon. Petreus is another one who should be put out to pasture, due to the lobbying he did in the press to get the "surge" approved.
It's time for General McChrystal to 'retire', his and others' insubordination and lack of respect for the civilian leadership of our country and the military is damaging our democracy.
Generals are to obey the President, not publicly criticize the President. This is insubordination. When General MacArthur was insubordinate, President Truman relieved him of command and sent him into retirement. Sounds reasonable. But President Obama probably will continue obeying the generals and other commanders of the US security state. The decline of democracy in America may be permanent and fatal. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as palliative care for nations as they die. Maybe that is what celebrity TV is for, to numb the American mind as the body politic dies.
President "Compromise" Obama will probably let slip this opportunity to show he has backbone.
He'll probably have a beer with McChrystal and ask him how much of an extension for the Afghanistan war he'd like.
Wouldn't it be a wonderful surprise if our president would summarily fire him, strip him of rank, and bring all our soldiers and war machinery home?
"Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was... he didn't seem very engaged.
The boss was pretty disappointed, says the adviser."
Actually, Obama is the boss. McChrystal is just one of the flunkies who work for him. It sounds to me like they need to not only get rid of McChrystal, but also the insubordinate morons on his staff.
The worst part of Gen. Westmoreland running his big mouth ... sorry, I meant to say Gen. McChrystal running his big mouth ... is that I feel compelled to stand up for that useless corporate tool in the white house.
It will be interesting to see if Obama lets McChrystal stay in the military. Of course, firing him might actually take some balls.
I seem to recall Pres. Truman firing MacArthur for exactly the same conduct. And, unlike the Butcher of Falluja, MacArthur actually knew how to win a war.
Actually, MacArthur was well past his prime when Truman fired him. David Halberstam's book The Longest Winter makes that clear.
You're correct, but in WWII he actually succeeded, unlike the cast of circus clowns who infest the pentagon today.
Chambers Johnson has clearly shown that the MIC is a power unto itself, not subject to anything but big money.
This bumper sticker would seem to ask the right question:
"Is Afghanistan Obama's Vietnam?"