General Stanley McChrystal Fired By Obama Over Story in Rolling Stone – To Be Replaced by Petraeus

Gen. Stanley McChrystal has apparently been fired by President Obama as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and will be replaced by Gen. David Petraeus, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It might seem like McChrystal is a macho idiot who self-destructed.  What if he knew exactly what he was doing when he talked to Rolling Stone and let his staff make disparaging remarks about administration officials?

What if this was a desperate gambit, some last attempt to get attention focused on the American failures in Afghanistan?

Probably not, I realize.  Probably all the analysis is true.  McChrystal is bull-headed and contemptuous of civilian authority.  He is burned out, not schooled in Pentagon politics, and he and his staff got stuck with a reporter in Paris because of the Iceland volcano and got drunk and started shooting their mouth off.   As a former peace volunteer in a war zone, I can see this, and it is essentially what Michael Hastings, the journalist, says.

Not his bosses though.  And while they are covering their backs, and were not in Paris, and I know we should not trust editors, well, sometimes you should trust editors who can see the big picture.  From CNN:

Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates, however, struck a less optimistic tone during an interview with CNN on Tuesday.

The comments made by McChrystal and other top military aides during the interview were “not off-the-cuff remarks,” he said. They “knew what they were doing when they granted the access.” The story shows “a deep division” and “war within the administration” over strategy in Afghanistan, he contended.

And there are hints that McChrystal, despite his abject apology and likely end to his career, knew exactly what he was doing.  As a former peace volunteer in a war zone, this fits too.  No military people I ever met trust the press this much.  The AP recalls how McChrystal forced Obama’s hand by using the press in getting the 30,000 extra troops sent to Afghanistan:

By the fall of 2009, McChrystal had decided that more troops were needed and sent the Pentagon a secret request for 40,000 reinforcements.

The request leaked, and White House aides were infuriated. They believed McChrystal had put Obama in a dilemma — ignore a decorated war general, or send more troops at the expense of political support.

And then there is this from Time on the tough spot this puts President Obama in:

GOP aides saw the issue as a trap for Obama: if he keeps McChrystal on, he could be cast as a weak leader, tolerant of insubordination. If he dismisses McChrystal, it would be a sign of disarray in his Afghan policy. “Obviously a General and his top brass don’t make statements like these without being frustrated,” announced House Republican whip Eric Cantor in a statement on Tuesday, clearly seeing the imbroglio as an opportunity to seek political advantage.

After all, the war in Afghanistan is going badly, really badly, something that has been clear for months but elicits none of the passion of, say, the oil spill or the Tea Party.  From Time again:

“There are all sorts of problems with this idea that foreigners can show up and suddenly impose a government from above,” says Alex Strick van Linschoten, a Kandahar-based researcher and analyst. “There are all sorts of local structures that were there before, which are now being replaced by something new,” he says of the Marines-led shuras and NATO-designated “key” leaders.

That’s something that’s a perennial feature of the foreign military intervention in southern Afghanistan. “What I can make out from Marjah is, it’s a confused strategy at best,” he says — and one that shouldn’t necessarily be left to military commanders to interpret. “Political things are being carried out more or less entirely by the U.S. military, which brings problems on its own.”

And the historical comparisons point to at least some political game playing.  The Telegraph in the UK has a good overview of how American wartime commanders get fired (it is no shock that no American outlet has bothered to take a long view).  Aside from recent incompetence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prime examples are Abraham Lincoln firing Gen. George McClellan in the Civil War and Harry Truman dumping Gen. Douglas McArthur in Korea, both decisions fraught with domestic political concerns.

Usually, I think too much competence is attributed to those in power.  This is why I distrust most conspiracy theories.  This is why though part of me wants to believe that BP and Tony Hayward have some evil plan, that he could not be this stupid, in the end, I think Hayward is this stupid.

But McChrystal?  I’m just not there yet.

Image here.