Month: June 2010

The price of threatening Joe McGinniss with violence …

Byron York:

I just got off the phone with a retired military man, with more than 25 years experience, who has worked with Gen. Stanley McChrystal in the Pentagon.  His reaction to McChrystal’s performance in the new Rolling Stone profile?  No surprise at all.

“Those of us who knew him would unanimously tell you that this was just a matter of time,” the man says.  “He talks this way all the time.  I’m surprised it took this long for it to rear its ugly head.”

Ackerman:

The amazing thing about it is there’s no complaints from McChrystal or his staff about the administration on any substantive ground. After all, McChrystal and his allies won the argument within the White House. All the criticisms — of Eikenberry, of Jones, of Holbrooke, of Biden — are actually just immature and arrogant snipes at how annoying Team America (what, apparently, McChrystal’s crew calls itself) finds them. This is not mission-first, to say the least.

In fact, you have to go deep in the piece to find soldiers and officers offering actual critiques — and what they offer is criticism of McChrystal for being insufficiently brutal. Everyone of them quoted here is a mini-Ralph Peters, upset because McChrystal won’t let them “get our fucking gun on,” as one puts it.

Ed Morrissey:

So far, McChrystal hasn’t earned enough leash by winning anything. Regardless of what one thinks of the current C-in-C, Obama is still the man elected by the people to run the executive branch and the military. The picture this article paints is one of a lack of discipline and respect, and the White House has every right to demand an apology and replace McChrystal with someone who understands better the subtleties of overall command and its politics.

Marcy Wheeler:

The article is far more subtle than the tizzy lets on. And the tizzy ignores the real moral of the story, revealed after five pages of eye-popping revelations. McChrystal’s counter-insurgency plan is failing. It’s failing not because some of his aides said mean things about Biden, and not because he’s got a long-running spat with Karl Eikenberry, our Ambassador to Afghanistan. It’s failing because the Special Ops guys, whom McChrystal led killing bunches of people in Iraq, are not hard-wired to win hearts and minds.

Andrew Exum:

Hastings obviously thinks counterinsurgency is a scam, and the real thrust of the article is not so much anti-McChrystal but anti-COIN. I did not feel Hastings made any effort to include arguments for the current strategy despite having conducted a lot of interviews…In a weird way, Hastings is making the argument to readers of Rolling Stone (Rolling Stone!) that counterinsurgency sucks because it doesn't allow our soldiers to kill enough people. What, pray tell, is Hastings' alternative to counterinsurgency? Disengagement from Afghanistan? Okay, but what would the costs and benefits of that disengagement be? I am frustrated by the reluctance of the legions of counterinsurgency skeptics to be honest about — or even discuss — the costs and benefits of alternatives. Some do, but not many.

Joe Klein, who loves the guy:

I suppose he will have to be sacked now. He is not irreplaceable. There are more than a few fine generals in the Army, including Lt. General David Rodriguez, a McChrystal deputy with vast experience in Afghanistan. But it is a terrible setback, a diversion from the business hand at a crucial moment in the conflict. And it is a real tragedy, because Stanley McChrystal is precisely the sort of man who should be leading American troops in battle.

Fallows:

If the facts are as they appear — McChrystal and his associates freely mocking their commander in chief and his possible successor (ie, Biden) and the relevant State Department officials (Holbrooke and Eikenberry) — with no contention that the quotes were invented or misconstrued, then Obama owes it to past and future presidents to draw the line and say: this is not tolerable. You must go. McChrystal's team was inexplicably reckless in talking before a reporter this way, but that's a separate question. The fact is — or appears to be — that they did it.

Ackerman:

Yesterday, Gates passed over Gen. James Mattis for Marine Corps commandant. If Obama wants to cashier McChrystal but not overhaul the entire strategy, Mattis is an option. Whether he’d do it is another thing, since he’s the outgoing commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command, so taking over ISAF will technically be a step down. But Mattis will otherwise retire from the Marines, so maybe he wouldn’t see it that way.

A reader writes:

Ariel Levy is a lady!  In fact, she is a fantastic gay lady writer who wrote this awesome story about her wedding, which you would enjoy.

Apologies to Ms. Levy.

The trouble with appointing Stanley McChrystal to run the Af-Pak war was always his temperament and his history. He is a driven man, strong-headed, amazingly disciplined, extremely able in a limited fashion – and clearly unused to compromise or getting along with people as powerful as he is. Diplomat he is not. As head of JSOC, moreover, he has always regarded himself as above political management, running a part of the military that seems at times to answer to no-one, and that, under Bush and Cheney was unleashed to do whatever it wanted, including, of course, brutal torture in the field, condoned from the very top.

These qualities might have seemed appealing at first for Afghanistan. Here you had a former torturer/badass who had learned by brutal experience that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be won that way. Converted to counter-insurgency as a philosophy, he was an apostate from the Bush-Cheney approach of "kill, bomb and torture until they embrace human rights" school.

Alas, you can't take an entire philosophy of warfare and reverse it easily, especially when your own men were among the most brutal and badass of the bunch. So you find comments like this from McChrystal's men:

"Bottom line?" says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing."

"Every real soldier." You see: there are real Americans and fake Americans; and there are real soldiers and fake ones. Let's just put it this way about the legacy of McChrystal's JSOC: you cannot imagine a soldier who had worked for Petraeus for a long time saying such a thing.

Alas, as is also ironically the case, there is no way counter-insurgency can work in the tenth year of occupation, without commitment to another thirty years, instead of eighteen months. And there is no way it can work without a viable and trusted central government. But Obama did not have the intellectual or political guts to walk away, and was trapped by early campaign announcements in favor of the "good war" in Afghanistan. It may well have been the good war in 2002; but that didn't make it a winnable war in 2009.

And so everyone without a personal or ideological or partisan stake in this knows the war McChrystal claimed he alone could win is doomed. It's in that context that I found the barbs directed at Biden the most revealing:

The article describes a conversation in which General McChrystal and an aide talk about Mr. Biden. Mr. Biden is known to have opposed the decision to escalate the war, preferring instead a slimmed-down plan focused on containing terrorism.

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” General McChrystal jokes.

“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say ‘Bite me?’ ”

It doesn't take a genius to see this contempt as rooted in the growing recognition among many and the growing fear among the McChrystal clique that Biden has been right all along, that the McChrystal strategy was a product of hope over experience, and that the arrogance that drove it was part of what had long been wrong with the conduct of both tragically flawed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You see the same fear in McChrystal's contempt for Eikenberry, who took the Biden position:

“He’s one that covers his flanks for the history books,” General McChrystal is quoted as saying. “Now, if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

Then this second remark about Eikenberry that helps remind us of why McChrystal was a Cheney darling:

"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of [McChrystal's] aides. "Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."

What this reveals to me is the incoherence of the Obama position on Afghanistan. We cannot win by 2011. And we will never win unless we devote far more resources and many more decades to neo-imperial control than America can afford and than the American and British publics will tolerate. Maybe deploying McChrystal to do his best – and still fail – will be the only way of proving this. Which is why this incident is actually, to my mind, a good thing.

It may help bring this madness to an earlier end.

(Photo: ISAF Commander General Stanley A. McChrystal yawns as he meets with high ranking military personnel October 7, 2009 at the forward operating base (FOB) Walton, outside of Kandahar, Afghanistan. By Paula Bronstein/Getty.)

Citing Leviticus, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association claims that the mauling death of a hiker in Yellowstone Park was divine retribution:

The grizzly is a predator, a fierce, savage unstoppable killing machine. … Because these researchers were intent on studying the grizzly rather than killing him to protect innocent human life, a husband, father and grandfather is dead today. This was an utterly unnecessary death which could have happened only because our culture has jettisoned a biblical view of the relative value of human life compared to animal life. Because this animal was given a nap instead of a bullet, a human being is dead, and a savage animal is alive, on the prowl, and ready to kill again.

Kyle at Right Wing Watch raises a hand:

Have I mentioned that Fischer is still listed as a "confirmed speaker" at the next Family Research Council Values Voter Summit along with Rep. Michele Bachmann, Rep. Mike Pence, and Mike Huckabee?  Just want to keep pointing that out.

Spain's David Villa – and a thing of beauty:

Villa ended up scoring both of his team's goals in the 2-0 defeat over Honduras (and he nearly scored a third).

Responding to Chait, Plumer wants legislation to tackle climate change:

In the long term … we'd really need a price on carbon to transform the country's energy sector and give people incentive to develop new clean-energy technologies—having the EPA just flatly tell polluters that they have to adopt this or that specific pollution-cutting gizmo isn't very good for innovation.

He also weighs the pros and cons of a utility-only energy bill. As do Dave Roberts and Michael Levi. The question here surely is whether using the EPA now is a form of emergency measure to preserve the option of a carbon bill or tax later. If you assume that climate change is already well in motion and that inaction could lead to unpredictable feedback loops, then time is the essence thereof. But I much prefer legislation and a full public debate to try to get Americans to put long-term interests above present gratification. Fat chance, I know, when it comes to the sacred brown substance now despoiling America's sea shore.

"This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic … Whatever the many failings of my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born,” – John Updike.

This sentiment – exploring what we know and not seeking to "transcend the limits of our age" is very conservative in the Oakeshottian sense, and one senses an appreciation of that by the few public intellectuals who retains a grasp of the conservative core, Sam Tanenhaus.

"If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody's field of ignorance," – David Dunning.