Short, Tense Deliberation, Then a General Is Gone

From the New York Times:

But this is the highest profile sacking of his presidency. The time between Mr. Obama’s first reading of the Rolling Stone article and his decision to accept General McChrystal’s resignation offers an insight into the president’s decision-making process under intense stress: He appears deliberative and open to debate, but in the end, is coldly decisive.

In a subsequent meeting with his Afghan war council, Mr. Obama delivered a tongue-lashing, instructing his advisers to stop bickering among themselves.

“The president said he didn’t want to see pettiness; that this was not about personalities or reputations — it’s about our men and women in uniform,” said a senior administration official, who like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity in offering an account of the last two days.

More here.

Actually, it's about far more than our men and women in uniform. It's about democracy.

This was totally the right call. There is a damned good reason our founding fathers made the commander-in-chief of the US military a civilian: there are too many examples throughout history, right up through today, of various nations' armies deciding that they could do a better job of ruling than their civilian governments--once the military has decided that it wants to run the country, it's over; there's little, if anything, a nation can do to stop it. Our founding fathers' solution to this massive threat to our democracy was to place the President in total charge of the military, and to make all members of the military swear an oath to the Constitution, which mandates their command structure.

Top generals publicly trash-talking their civilian commanders comes way too close to upsetting this already fragile political arrangement. It doesn't matter how good of a warrior McChrystal is. He had to go.

And this is kind of sad. Pretty much everybody says that McChrystal is a great general, a great leader. One of those guys like Patton or MacArthur or Custer or Montgomery, who motivated men with charisma and an intense personal style.

According to Reuters:

(Rolling Stone editor Eric) Bates said he was not surprised McChrystal was so forthcoming and blunt, saying the military leader saw himself as a "terrorist hunter" with "cowboy style."

And from Wikipedia

He runs seven to eight miles a day, eats one meal, and sleeps for four hours a night.

I even heard on CNN last night that McChrystal often runs around Afghanistan bare chested. I mean, what a hardcore dude. Alas, it appears that the flamboyance that works so well on the battlefield is ill suited for interacting with civilian leadership. That is, McChrystal apparently doesn't know when to shut the fuck up, something his replacement, General Petraeus, knows how to do well. Indeed, this all reveals some of the fragility of the anti-coup system embedded in our Constitution: military thinking must necessarily be black and white, while civilian politics is nothing but shades of grey. Perhaps in a democracy the greatest generals have to be confined to lower rungs of the leadership ladder--what makes them great at war is the same thing that makes them awful with democracy.

Of course, what makes this really sad is that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, and, at this point, meaningless, given that Al Qaeda is no longer there, and the "nation" in which we fight hasn't ever really been a nation state in the way we understand the term in the West, and therefore ill suited to becoming one today.

Sigh.


General Stanley McChrystal.

Okay, just kidding. It's actually Robert Duval playing
Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.

Same difference.

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