by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n He Had to Go<\/strong><\/p>\n 1) McChrystal, in fact, is a brave and heroic figure deserving our respect. But among friends and with a mole in his midst, he still himself deprecated the commander in chief. His staff took care of the VP, the national security team, and most of the diplomatic personnel involved in Afghanistan. All came close to conduct unbecoming of officers: \u201cIn private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama\u2019s top people on the diplomatic side.\u201d And here in McChrystal\u2019s own words: \u201cAre you asking about Vice President Biden?\u201d McChrystal says with a laugh. \u201cWho\u2019s that?\u201d And the general creates a climate in which his staff reduces his superiors to fools: \u201cIt was a 10-minute photo op,\u201d says an adviser to McChrystal. \u201cObama clearly didn\u2019t know anything about him, who he was. Here\u2019s the guy who\u2019s going to run his f\u2026ing war, but he didn\u2019t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.\u201d That\u2019s right out of George McClellan\u2019s frequent caricatures of Lincoln. What was more worrisome than the general\u2019s own remarks was the ease in which his subordinates thought they could quite graphically trash their superiors \u2014 to a reporter, no less.<\/p>\n 2) Is it smart to be in Paris within a mile of any creep from\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em>? How dumb is that? Such tag-along groupie folk exist to trash the military, and only get close to officers by being disingenuous in a manner that most teenagers would not fall for \u2014 much less a four-star general supposedly adept in insurgency trickery. What was the motivation? An accident? Ego? An effort to send a shot across the diplomats\u2019 bow? Worry that the war is going south and a cry from the heart to get attention?<\/p>\n 3) Who wasn\u2019t trashed? We get jokes about meeting with a French diplomat \u2014 at a time when we want the French to stay in the war. Why should we know that McChrystal voted for Obama? To this day, speculations about Petraeus\u2019s political ambitions are always predicated on queries like: \u201cBut what party would he run with?\u201d How did that come up? Do generals now self-identify as left or right \u2014 and if so, for what purposes other than careerist advancement?<\/p>\n 4) If McChrystal were not fired, then what would have happened if a dissident colonel or major gave the same sort of trash interview about McChrystal himself, or if such an officer\u2019s subordinate captains and majors dished the same dirt on McChrystal to the press that his team did about their president? McChrystal has a reputation for not tolerating any untoward conduct. Yet within hours he let into his innermost circle a creepy sort, and then all poured their hearts out to him. To whom wouldn\u2019t they have talked trash?<\/p>\n 5) The story was vulgar. We are introduced to Gen. McChrystal in the piece as he flips off his polite chief of staff (e.g., \u201cThe dinner comes with the position, sir,\u201d says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn. McChrystal turns sharply in his chair. \u201cHey, Charlie,\u201d he asks, \u201cDoes this come with the position?\u201d). The point is not that officers talk tough, but that generals talk that way with outsiders in the room, and among lower-ranking officers.<\/p>\n And Then There Is The Politics of All This<\/strong><\/p>\n 1) Petraeus was a wise choice. He will face far less criticism from the media and politicians than during 2007-8 (e.g., there will be no more \u201cGeneral Betray Us\u201d ads or \u201csuspension of disbelief\u201d ridicule, or someone like an Obama at the confirmation hearing sermonizing nonstop on why Petraeus\u2019s efforts will fail), because his success this time will reflect well on Obama rather than George Bush. Consider the further irony that Obama is suddenly surging with Petraeus. Not long ago he was declaring that just such a strategy and commander were doomed to failure in Iraq (see below). Of course, then he was running to take office on what was wrong rather than trying to stay in office on what\u2019s right.<\/p>\n 2) I smiled at Obama\u2019s reference today to \u201ccommon purpose.\u201d True, but again not long ago at a critical juncture in Iraq, Obama himself, entirely for partisan purposes and on the campaign trail, had no interest in the common purpose of military success in Iraq. Here is Obama in 2007 on the surge (at a time when we desperately needed \u201ccommon purpose\u201d):<\/p>\n \u201cI am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.\u201d Or: \u201cI don\u2019t think the president\u2019s strategy is going to work. We went through two weeks of hearings on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; experts from across the spectrum \u2014 military and civilian, conservative and liberal \u2014 expressed great skepticism about it. My suggestion to the president has been that the only way we\u2019re going to change the dynamic in Iraq and start seeing political commendation is actually if we create a system of phased redeployment. And, frankly, the president, I think, has not been willing to consider that option, not because it\u2019s not militarily sound but because he continues to cling to the belief that somehow military solutions are going to lead to victory in Iraq.\u201d Or: \u201cMy assessment is that the surge has not worked.\u201d<\/p>\n 3) McChrystal\u2019s crudities, of course, were mostly on target. The Afghanistan policy and those who carry it out do not inspire confidence: Deadlines only empower the Taliban to wait us out. (Remember that George Bush refused to set them for that very reason.) Obama did not meet with McChrystal for months. It was foolish to pick a public fight with our Karzai ally. It was sillier to turn loose mega-egos like Holbrooke and Eikenberry with the expectation they would be team players. (NB: this reminds us that we can see that one of the reasons that the surge worked was a particular tone established at the top by Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Crocker is also a much underestimated figure, whose professionalism and competence will increasingly be appreciated, in contrast to the current diplomatic team in Afghanistan. We owe him a great deal; he was not an advocate of invading Iraq, and yet when asked to serve did his best to carry out a policy that saved lives and a country itself. He was a far better candidate for a Nobel Prize than Obama will ever be.)<\/p>\n 4) Conservatives err by citing all sorts of legitimate reasons for McChrystal to have expressed frustration: sorry \u2014 all are irrelevant in terms of his dismissal. We all agree with almost all of them. But they are not the issue. It remains judgment, the chain of command, civilian\/military relations, and the very wisdom of palling around with a reckless loose-cannon reporter in Paris. He had to go, pronto.<\/p>\n 5) The politics of McChrystal were weird, at least as I observed them. For weeks conservatives and many in the military complained of his restrictive rules of engagement \u2014 to a degree far more so than during the Anbar Awakening under Petraeus. One cannot be faulting McChrystal for having a COIN strategy that endangers troops in the field, and then regret that Obama is, with good cause, relieving someone who was the avatar of that strategy. So what is it? (I suspect that troops in the field will be split over the decision to remove McChrystal, with some perhaps relieved.)<\/p>\n 6) The Left is in a trap in Afghanistan of its own making. From 2007-8, Obama\u00a0et al<\/em>. created a false narrative of Afghanistan as the good war and Iraq the bad, predicated not on facts, but only on casualty rates, public opinion, and their own desire to strut national security toughness without ever making gut-check decisions. Afghanistan was quiet in 2007 and so seen as stable \u2014 so why not adopt a \u201clet me at \u2018em\u201d attitude? Iraq was scary, so why not trash it as Bush\u2019s lost and unnecessary war? But Afghanistan has no tradition of secular literacy, Iraq a little \u2014 and no ports, terrible terrain, no oil or cash to work with, a nuclear Pakistan next door, and so on and on. Some of us cringed when we saw that Obama was taking the tougher challenge and boasting of his warrior cred, and trashing a war that was winnable, and indeed in the very process of being won. Nemesis again for the nth time with this president. (Cf. Guantanamo suddenly no longer the gulag, or renditions and Predators no longer terror).<\/p>\n 7) Obama got our attention off BP for a day, and a bad day it was, as the spill regushed this morning in greater volume, so to speak. His speech was fine \u2014 if one ignores the usual serial invocation of \u201cI\u201d, \u201cme,\u201d and \u201cmy\u201d that we\u2019ve become accustomed to, as the president tries to radiate authority with first person pronouns rather than common sense reality.<\/p>\n The tragedy of all this? There was a way for McChrystal to have expressed his frustration that would have done himself and the nation a lot of good: write a letter warning of the problems, then when it was not acted upon, formally resign and express the reasons for such a departure. McChrystal was apparently at a point anyway where something was going to blow up, so why not have gone out with dignity and with a lesson for the nation, rather than being dry gulched by\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em>\u00a0and playing right into the hands of those like Jones, Eikenberry, and Holbrooke?<\/p>\n 9) David Petraeus had earned a much needed respite with the CentCom command. Yet here we go again calling on his talents, after his recent brush with cancer and his fainting spell. The odds are against Petraeus this time; but I remain hopeful for this reason: if Petraeus cannot win Afghanistan, then it is not winnable for Americans. And I tend to think it is very winnable, if Obama cuts out the withdrawal talk, keeps his differences with Karzai private, gives Petraeus free rein, and brings in someone like Crocker on the diplomatic side. Right now we must have only the best. A General Mattis at CentCom would do wonders. A Crocker\/Petraeus\/Matthis team would be like finally getting Grant\/Sherman in control. (Yes, I know, we have a verbose Edward Everett, not an insightful Lincoln in charge.)<\/p>\n Petraeus is our modern Belisarius, which both encourages and scares me because such talents do everything for us and are, in the end, treated very poorly for their efforts. I hope the final chapter with Petraeus ends better than Justinian\u2019s treatment of the one general who gave him victory when defeat was certain.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media He Had to Go 1) McChrystal, in fact, is a brave and heroic figure deserving our respect. But among friends and with a mole in his midst, he still himself deprecated the commander in chief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[587],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-oF","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1538,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-mcchrystal-endnote\/","url_meta":{"origin":1529,"position":0},"title":"A McChrystal Endnote","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 24, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Obama had no choice but to do what he did, and the wise Petraeus move was obviously a mitigating factor. Obama\u2019s speech, despite the customarily excessive use of \u201cI,\u201d \u201cme,\u201d and \u201cmy,\u201d was workmanlike and wise in its emphasis on continuity of strategy. In\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2010"","block_context":{"text":"June 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/june-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1536,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-mcchrystal-mess\/","url_meta":{"origin":1529,"position":1},"title":"The McChrystal Mess","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 24, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Many have commented on the unfairness of it all, and made good points: a) Obama, having demagogued the Iraq war, and campaigned on a \u201clet me at \u2019em\u201d in the \u201cgood\u201d war in Afghanistan, has done his best to renege on his 2008 chest-thumping\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2010"","block_context":{"text":"June 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/june-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1504,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-successful-trifecta\/","url_meta":{"origin":1529,"position":2},"title":"A Successful Trifecta","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 11, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Light amid Darkness It is crazy to think that going back from Centcom to forces commander in Afghanistan is any sort of \u201cdemotion\u201d\u00a0for Petraeus, who quite naturally needed some sort of respite after the ordeal of endless 20-hour days in Iraq. He is at\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2010"","block_context":{"text":"July 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/july-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10874,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-worse-than-a-crime\/","url_meta":{"origin":1529,"position":3},"title":"It\u2019s Worse Than a Crime . . .","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 10, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"The Corner The one and only. by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 I agree with most commentators that Michael Wolff\u2019s sensational mythologies in Fire and Fury will be largely forgotten within three weeks \u2014 with one caveat (see below). \u00a0 Wolff confirmed what most already knew about the Left\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2083,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/are-we-to-be-led-in-war-by-a-tiger-or-a-kitten\/","url_meta":{"origin":1529,"position":4},"title":"Are We to Be Led in War by a “Tiger” or a Kitten?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner I\u00a0agree with many here that the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan\u00a0is positive news. And, yes, we should be thankful to President Obama that (for now) Generals Petraeus and McChrystal have at least 18 months and greater resources to secure the country before\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2009"","block_context":{"text":"December 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/december-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2197,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/narcissus-in-chief\/","url_meta":{"origin":1529,"position":5},"title":"Narcissus-in-Chief","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 22, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner While our Narcissus-in-Chief is frozen gazing at his perfect image in his private pool, choices have to be made in Afghanistan. Consider the following: (a) We have a Democratically controlled Congress that by and large has supported, since 2004, the Kerry-Obama-Hillary Clinton narrative of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2009"","block_context":{"text":"October 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/october-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1529"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1530,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529\/revisions\/1530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}