Obama vs. the U.S. Army
In confiding to Rolling Stone their unflattering opinions of the military acumen of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones, Dick Holbrooke and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff were guilty of colossal stupidity.
And President Obama had cause to cashier them. Yet his decision to fire McChrystal may prove both unwise and costly.
For McChrystal, unlike Gen. MacArthur, never challenged the war policy—he is carrying it out—and Barack Obama is no Harry Truman.
Moreover, the war strategy Obama is pursuing is the McChrystal Plan, devised by the general and being implemented by the general in Marja and Kandahar, perhaps the decisive campaign of the war.
Should that plan now fail, full responsibility falls on Obama.
He has made the Afghan war his war in a way it never was before.
If the McChrystal strategy fails, critics will charge Obama with causing the defeat by firing the best fighting general in the Army out of pique over some officers-club remarks that bruised the egos of West Wing warriors.
And though those remarks never should have appeared in print, they may well reflect the sentiments of not a few soldiers and Marine officers on third and fourth tours of duty in the Afghan theater.
Had Obama, instead of firing McChrystal, told him to shut up, can the interviews and go back to fighting the war until the December review of strategy, he could have shown those soldiers he is a bigger man than they or McChrystal's team give him credit for.
And if success in Afghanistan is the highest goal, how does it help to fire the best fighting general? Do you relieve Gen. Patton during combat because he vents his prejudices or opinions?
This city may draw the parallel, but the Obama-McChrystal clash does not remotely rise to the historic level of the collision between MacArthur and Truman.
Truman had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ordered the airlift that broke the Berlin blockade, and produced the Marshall Plan and NATO. He had won election in his own right with a legendary comeback in 1948.
Obama has nothing like Truman's credibility as a war leader.
And MacArthur was the most famous U.S. soldier since Gen. Grant. No. 1 at West Point, he was a legendary commander in France in 1918, leading troops out of the trenches with a swagger stick.
Driven out of the Philippines in 1942, he had declared, "I shall return," and led the liberation of the islands in 1944. He conducted the famous island-hopping campaign up the archipelagos of the South Pacific and took Japan's surrender on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
As military proconsul, he presided over the reconstruction of Japan, wrote her constitution and converted her into an ally.
When North Korea invaded the South and drove the U.S. Army into the Pusan perimeter, MacArthur landed Marines far behind enemy lines at Inchon in a flanking maneuver that destroyed the North Korean army and will be studied at military academies for centuries to come.
In late 1950, MacArthur was stunned by the intervention in Korea of the armies of Mao Zedong, lately victorious in China's four-year civil war.
MacArthur's clash with Truman was not over something so trivial as a gossipy article in Rolling Stone. MacArthur's hands had been tied by Truman.
He was not allowed to bomb the Yalu bridges over which Chinese troops were pouring into Korea. He was not allowed to bomb Chinese troop concentrations and munitions dumps in Manchuria. He was not allowed to use Chiang Kai-shek's armies on Taiwan. He was not allowed hot pursuit of enemy aircraft into Chinese or Russian airspace.
MacArthur was being restricted to fighting the war Mao wanted to fight, a war of attrition against the world's most populous nation, and largest army, while China was allowed to remain a privileged sanctuary, off-limits to U.S. bombers like those that smashed Germany and Japan.
In his address to Congress, after his firing by Truman, MacArthur put it this way: "'Why,' my soldiers asked of me, 'surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?' I could not answer."
MacArthur's letter to Rep. Joe Martin, in response to a letter from the GOP leader, was indeed a challenge to Truman's policy of avoiding any risk of a clash with Russia, even if it meant U.S. soldiers would pay the price of Truman's timidity.
Events would prove MacArthur right.
Truman's restrictions would ensure a "no-win war" for two more years that would cost tens of thousands more American lives, and Harry would be sent packing with the lowest rating of any president in history.
Gen. Eisenhower would take office, two years after MacArthur's firing, and threaten the exact escalation MacArthur envisioned, ending the Korean War in six months.
Obama and his party may be celebrating his cashiering of Gen. McChrystal as a macho moment, but by firing the fighting general, for his foolish remarks, Obama has deepened the gulf between his party and the U.S. military.
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Entries(RSS)
Look, we could put Gomer Pyle and Sergeant Carter in charge of the military effort in Afghanistan and win the "fighten part" of the war. What we can't do is this insane idea of imposing a foreign culture on a ancient culture in one or two decades of military occupation and bloodshed. How many experiments need to be performed before these materialists running our country confirm the results --- there are some people in the world who do not live on bread alone!!! Or as Pat once put it in another column, "you cannot defeat a country with a great religion, with a country that has no religion." It is not technique, it is the evidence of things unseen, for God's sake!
McChystal a fighting general? Our men in the protracted fire fights literally have to offer themselves up as targets before they can fire back at their attackers use a different adjective before general. McChrystal's restrictive engagement policies are escalating American casualties. He has been quoted saying he wants to "Win the hearts and minds", of the Afghan people. Where did he hear that before, and how well did it work out?
I doubt Obama has lost any ground with the perfumed generals and the co-ed military.
Robert has it exactly rightMcChrystal may be the best "fighting General," we have, just ask him, and he is a not afraid to face real gun fire himself. But his stupidity and hubris know no bounds, as is obvious. Apart from his strategy of paying protection money to the Taliban in the form of security contracts, which is bankrupting us Americans, he has no strategic sense as demonstrated how he has continuously tried to grow the war with more troops.
These nitwit COIN geniuses who say COIN takes 15 - 20 years need to be asked; what happens then? The answer, in the case of foreign occupiers confronting insurgency, is failure. Ask the British about their former colonies. Malaysia, the so-called success story, no longer has British colonialism, which is what the insurgency was about. Britain was kicked out of every single colony they once had after wasting treasure on counterinsurgency. In their defense, they were defending British colonialist lives. France in Algeria, the US in Vietnam, Afghanistan under the Soviets are all modern examples of COIN failures. And then the counter-insurgency ends because of economic failure and all other costs having become unsustainable, to the strategic detriment of the counter-insurgents. That is our future.
I could not agree more with Mr. Buchanan on this matter and the example from the past. If anyone was "foolish" or: questionably patriotic, it would be Rolling Stone Magazine. If it was Newsweek or Time, this would have entirely different meaning and weight. Rolling Stone managed to be the main political paper of the moment, subject of press conferences involving very top of U.S. government, military, diplomacy.......that is not fair. To soldiers at least.
Perhaps I am saying all this because I share opinions and dislikes of Gen. McChrystal who allowed himself to skip hypocrisy of political protocols and ordinary CYA business sticking to what he suppose to be: a soldier. I wonder how Rolling Stone got to be "inbeded" with General and his staff in a first place.
God help the Presidency of Barack Obama and the choices he was, is and will be served. Harry Truman, excellent example.........
Rolling Stone did a heroic thing, if at least unintentionally so.
It exposed a general with a half-baked warfighting strategy, this counter-insurgency nonsense, which is doomed to fail, because it involves doing something in a few years, what was never achieved in decades.
And from where does this half-baked strategy come? It comes from egotistical maniac with stupid aides - all the more reminder that he is the least rational kind of character to be running such an expensive and useless affair. This is General McChrystal - the man who covered up torture in Iraq. This is a lunatic, and one in charge of one of the most major operations being conducted.
Occupation is expensive. The British emptied out their treasuries trying to hold on to India and Africa. Oh, they did build our railway stations, our post offices, our old roads, and some of our oldest cities. And boy, did that burn away all their money. It is expensive to do business in poor and remote places. It is expensive to do activities abroad where there is no infrastructure. And it is expensive to transport those goods abroad to build that infrastructure. So if it was so expensive to maintain colonies for the British, why did the British have those colonies?
The British had those colonies for military purposes and military pride. And arrogant generals had all the say - no politician or bureaucrat had the ability to stop these activities. We are talking about the burning away of enormous gold bullion of the British public wealth, with no regard for the British taxpayer. All because of what generals decided arbitrarily. This is money that could have stayed for civilian purposes, created tens of thousand moree jobs in Britain, made a large segment of the British population much better off, and alleviated the poverty caused by the Enclosure Acts.
In a perfect world we would take our troops out of Afghanistan and station them on the Arizona/Mexico border.
God help the Presidency of Barack Obama? God is laughing, for Obama has to be a divine joke.
What would be the criteria for "victory" in Afghanistan? The only stated goal is to free that "nation" from the clutches of the Taliban, whatever that is. In a region where there have been nearly constant tribal and clan conflicts going on for thousands of years, and since any group can be accused of being the Taliban, the chances for anything more than a brief truce between several factions is about nil. I am coming to think that our invasion of that hapless place is a more modern version of Lincoln's sending out General Dodge to exterminate the Indians along the route of the Union Pacific Railroad, only this time the ethnic cleansing is to secure pipeline routes.
Call this a radical perspective, but I'd say that the "Taliban", or ordinary villagers fighting for their lands are fairly heroic freedom fighters.
Actually, declassified documents by US military officials showed that the Taliban fighters are not interested in full scale fighting or killing, but just causing enough distractions or diversions for US troops to get them tied up everywhere. One report stated that their primary interest is in keeping communities stable and safe; the fighting is minimal and only meant to make it a bigger headache for US to stay there. This way, the Taliban have earned the support of a large majority of villages.
It's a situation where whatever happens, US loses.
Beginning with Korea, every war has been undeclared, therefore unconstitutional. That's the only point that should matter. Pat should remember his own great book, "A Republic, Not An Empire."
An invasion of New York, California and Massachusetts makes more sense than staying in Afghanistan.
McCallum
How did McChrystal suddenly become a military genius and hero? Nobody gets to his position in the U.S. armed forces today who is not a conniving, lick-spittle bureaucrat. Why are we even talking about war in Afghanistan? The only possible justification for any involvement of American lives and treasure would have been a quick punitive expedition after that remote historic event 9/11.
Dr. Wilson - years ago I read of an analysis that indicated that it was predominately "Type A" personalities that achieved the 06 rank (Captain in the Navy and full Colonel in the other services), but it was predominately those who were more "people" oriented that achieved higher rank after that. You could interpret that to mean that you had to be well-qualified in military knowledge and skills at the lower ranks, but you had to be a politician to achieve the highest ranks.
What's the general opinion in this place of General Petraeus then? Is he also a conniving manipulative character? Or is he just a man following orders who happens to be in a high position?
The fact that he collapsed on to a table under intense questioning shows that he may be an emotionally feeble man; I wonder if it scares many Americans that he is in charge of Aghanistan now. Or perhaps assures them of an earlier Afghan withdrawal?
Nothing quoted in either the Post or Rolling Stone articles rose to the level of a sacking offense. This little kerfuffle is strictly the reaction of non-veterans who have led sheltered lives, are unaware of how soldiers talk, and are therefore easily frightened and offended.
Gilbert,
You are correct. The story I read in Rolling Stone had no legs for anybody familiar with military reality. The only thing I found unusual was the access the reporter had to the General'staff and the fact that former special ops officers would have ever trusted such a character -- on or off the record. Other than that reservation, the conversations were typical. The articles about Dennis Hopper, Lady Gaga and that crazy father of Regae, Mr Perry, were more revealing about culture rot and the rank smell of such a culture spreading freedom in Afghanistan than anything said by or about the General and his staff.
#13 Col. Hackworth talks about the ticket-punching that is necessary for officers to get promoted in the US Army, and from what others have written since then, things haven't changed much. Gen. McChrystal was certainly able to obtain some choice commands.
*and from what others have written since then, I believe things haven’t changed much.
Gen. McChrystal's profile is no longer available at the ISAF website, but one can get a pretty good idea of the quality of his career path from his wikipedia entry.
I find it a bit curious that none of the sources I have been able to access about McChrystal says anything about where he was born and grew up, or his family, etc.
McChrystal approved the article before it aired. He probably wanted to get canned.
Dr. Wilson, apparently Gen. McChrystal is himself an army brat -- perhaps he has no real childhood home.
Mr. Van Sant,
What you described is what I am witnessing at all large organizations these days - business enterprises, schools, government in general. Those at the top are increasingly pure politicians and, astonishing as it may be, not well versed in any of the basic skills required to run those organizations. I suspect this is one of the reasons we are beginning to witness the collapse of so many large institutions in our country.
My area of knowledge is the large business enterprises I have worked in and I can tell you that there are many, many, many capable people who are increasingly depressed by the fact that they know how to help their failing organizations but have been prevented from doing so by the hammerlock that crazed or ignorant executives have on the organization.
As some of the organizational experts may describe it: it's not a "knowledge" gap but rather a "doing" gap.
21. Eagle. What you describe is certainly true of college presidents, deans, etc.
Wait a second, but there is a difference.
Even though college presidents and deans are political characters (Eisenhower was also once a dean of university, right?), they don't have any power.
I thought the problem with institutions of higher learning was that actual professors wielded all power, and the dean is restricted by them, and can't make good changes that he otherwise has the power to make.
It's different from business enterprises, where the top administrative people do wield power, and moreso than college deans.