That means that sub Zero owns this war. That sub Zero will lose it. That this will be his Waterloo.
WHo WEE.. if Barry Half-White could read my mind.. he would blush..
“to a reporter from a liberal, counter-cultural magazine”
He supported & voted for Obama - what does that make him?
I had exactly that thought.
It was a head shot by Rolling Stone carefully calculated to inflame the rage of the most thin-skinned president in our lifetime.
The title, calling McChrystal a “runaway,” clearly trumpeted dishonorable cowardice and smeared a patriot just like the General Betrayus title smeared Petraeus.
There wasn't the slightest evidence of “runaway” in the character of McChrystal if you don't count an aversion to fancy formal French dinners.
Right below the title Obama would, of course, been enraged by the reference to “wimps in the White House” falsely attributed to McChrystal. I couldn't find any use of the word “wimp” by McChrystal or his staff, only by the reporter who wrote story, or the editor who wrote that line under the story title.
Here is a quote from a UK Telegraph article showing an assessment more grounded in reality, unlike the fawning US media who proclaimed Obama brilliant for demoting Petraeus to replace McChrystal:
“How wrong the conventional wisdom can be. Obama’s actions in dragging McChrystal back to Washington and personally sacking him in as dramatic a fashion as possible in fact displayed weakness. They also avoided the real problem - his confused Afghanistan policy and dysfunctional civilian team.
“No one would pretend that the profane, juvenile banter of McChrystal and his aides was clever or appropriate, never mind in the presence of an iconoclastic Rolling Stone reporter. The general, a legendary combat leader who engaged in fire fights in Iraq alongside SAS troopers while in his 50s, deserved to be reprimanded.
“Inartful and ill-advised as the words were, however, they also spoke to a justifiable deep frustration within the US military in Afghanistan and contained a degree of truth about Obama’s civilian officials that made the famously thin-skinned President decidedly uncomfortable.”
It was clearly a setup and hit job from beginning to end!
Exactly why remains to be seen IMHO
Sorry, but I am going to disagree with almost everyone here... He was too much aligned with the progressive left and caused unnecessary deaths of our soldiers with his feel good policies. I can understand that many of those same policies came from Obama, but if you don’t stand up for the troops, you are useless in my mind.
An email from a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan:
We can all agree that McChrystal was imprudent to allow a freelancer (for Rolling Stone!) access to himself and his inner circle. He has admitted as much. But the hysteria is seriously overwrought:
1. He didn’t undermine civilian control in Afghanistan. Nothing in the article questions the policy set by the president in December. On the contrary, McChrystal and his aides main complaint is that the president’s civilian advisors are undermining the president’s policy. This is significantly different from Fox Fallon, who was fired as CENTCOM commander after that Esquire profile in March 2008 because he disagreed with and undermined President Bush’s policies in the region.
2. He didn’t speak disrespectfully of his chain of command. That chain, remember, runs from McChrystal to Petraeus to Gates to the President. Jim Jones, Dick Holbrooke, and others are unelected staffers and considerably less accomplished than is McChrystal, for that matter. (The same applies to Biden, even though he’s elected.) Plus, McChrystal himself is quoted directly only about Biden and Holbrooke; neither quote is especially critical. The most surprising tidbit to me is that McChrystal voted for Obama...
3. All these blind quotes are basically true, aren’t they? Does anyone in this town disagree that Jones is out of his depth? Or that Holbrooke is a wounded animal? Or that Eikenberry has a serious ego problem, resents his failure to get a fourth star, or blindsided McChrystal with that cable to protect himself?
4. I wouldn’t even concede the blind quotes are accurate. Is Hastings a reliable reporter? I do know that he writes that the surge began in 2006 and that McChrystal was “regimental” commander of 3rd Ranger “Battalion.” One doesn’t need any military knowledge to know these are wrong. How many other errors did he make?
Anyway, that’s the two cents of a low-level veteran!
-Found at - http://www.hughhewitt.com/blog/
“We shouldn’t be surprised that he took less than 40 hours to sack his hand-picked commander in Afghanistan even after dithering for four months over that commander’s recommendations.” - Hugh
Anyone who gives an interview to the druggie, sex,rock and roll, anti-war, anti-military, Rolling Stone is an idiot, and deserved whatever he gets.
The fact that this supposedly “brilliant” military man voted for Obama just confirms that fact.
McChrystal crossed the line in a big way. He deserved precisely what he got and received even better than he deserved. Wes “The Weasel” Clark was fired in a telephone call from the Chairman. That's about what McChrystal deserved.
Endless war, a recipe for four-star arrogance
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Sunday, June 27, 2010; B01
Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics. Events of the past week — notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s dismissal — hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military’s professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms.
Earlier generations of American leaders, military as well as civilian, instinctively understood the danger posed by long wars. “A democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War,” Gen. George C. Marshall once remarked. The people who provided the lifeblood of the citizen army raised to wage World War II had plenty of determination but limited patience. They wanted victory won and normalcy restored.
The wisdom of Marshall’s axiom soon became clear. In Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson plunged the United States into what became its Seven Years War. The citizen army that was sent to Southeast Asia fought valiantly for a time and then fell to pieces. As the conflict dragged on, Americans in large numbers turned against the war — and also against the troops who fought it.
After Vietnam, the United States abandoned its citizen army tradition, oblivious to the consequences. In its place, it opted for what the Founders once called a “standing army” — a force consisting of long-serving career professionals.
excerpt
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/217424_Endless_war_a_recipe_for_four-