General Stanley McChrystal
Today President Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal for what he called "poor judgement" in his candid remarks recorded in a Rolling Stone article criticizing several senior level officials. McChrystals' staff members also joined in with comments about Joe Biden in which he is nick named "Bite me" and Richard Holbrooke is called a "wounded animal". One of the generals' staff members discussed an oval office meeting between Obama and McChrystal in which they worked out the surge of troops into Afghanistan last year, a strategy that McChrystal lobbied heavily to implement. The staff member interviewed described Obama as "not very engaged" and added that his boss General McChrystal "was pretty disappointed." I wonder if Obama were to speak candidly if he might be "disappointed" in McChrystals failed strategy, and the overall failure in Afghanistan.
But here is the most interesting part of the puzzle, the previous US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry was also targeted by McChrystals comments. Leaked internal discussions last November revealed Eikenberrys' opposition to McChrystals' surge of 40,000 additional troops based on the corruption of Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his brother who heads one of the largest opium poppy trades in the country. This came not long after a demonstrably rigged election in which Karzai retained his presidential seat and his unofficial title of "The mayor of Kabul". Obama threw in his lot with this US puppet by endorsing the elections despite the overwhelming evidence of vote rigging.
Not surprisingly, McChrystal said he felt "Betrayed" by Eikenberrys' comments. I could understand why a senior commander in the context of a war would not want internal disagreements to be aired to the public, but is it really a matter of betrayal to simply disagree? Or was it only a problem because this was someone who had all of the necessary facts to come to his conclusions instead of someone from the outside who can state the obvious again and again and simply be dismissed by the top brass as not knowing the details of the situation on the ground? Whatever happened behind the scenes, Eikenberry headed to Washington a few short weeks later to tell congress that he fully supported McChrystals planned surge, even though nothing had changed to address his previously stated concerns.
So the buzz in the media and the word from Obama himself is that these comments from McChrystal and his staff showed "poor judgment". But Obama decided to hold firm to the surge policy still in effect in Afghanistan. If McChrystal showed signs of poor judgement, and it was his poor judgement that persuaded Obama to adopt the surge in opposition to the dire warnings of the US ambassador to Afghanistan, why then can we not question the ongoing policy there? The answer is simple, Obama does not want to appear weak, a sure sign that he actually is weak and that the current policy is the real "wounded animal". Obamas' strongest virtue is his critical thinking intellectual skills, if he is unwilling to use these skills for fear of attack from the right, he is bound and gagged and utterly powerless.
To make matters worse Obama is replacing Stanley McChrystal with general David Petreus, currently head of CentCom and previously commander in Iraq under George W. Bush. Petraeus was the architect of Iraqs counter-insurgency strategy of surging the country with tens of thousands of additional troops. We heard over and over again that this "surge was working" as Republicans squeezed it for more and more political capital in the elections taking place around the US at that time. But later we learned that it wasn't the surge of troops that was having the largest effect on the insurgency, but the surge of cash that those soldiers were given to hand out to people who simply promised not to shoot at them. 
The apparent success of Petraeus' surge was purchased by the American tax payers so that the strategy would lend legitimacy to the Republican party and the Bush administrations' war of terror. We never had enough troops for a real counter-insurgency occupation of Iraq so Petraeus decided that the Iraqi forces would be quadrupled to pick up the slack. With this single decision Petraeus showed his poor judgement by trusting that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be loyal to their chain of command and not simply turn around and take their new weapons and training and join the insurgency against the armies occupying their homeland. To this day Iraq is a broken country having cost billions of US taxpayer dollars, tens of thousands of dead and wounded soldiers, and millions of dead and displaced Iraqi civilians.It's no wonder John McCain is happy Petraeus will be taking over, he wanted an endless war and now he knows he'll get what he wants.
No comments:
Post a Comment