Obama’s MacArthur moment

It’s not surprising that those in charge of the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan are critical of the Obama administration’s ability to run a war. The revelations about McChrystal and his staff made in an article in Rolling Stone Magazine aren’t earth shattering. That Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff are critical of the president and his advisors is likely the worst kept secret in the US today. A much more important question is what happens now?

---

Gen. McChrystal has accepted responsibility for the disclosures and has tendered his resignation, which under the circumstances is only the honorable thing to do. The White House has summoned McChrystal for a meeting, which will take place today, so that McChrystal can give an “explanation” for the revelations that found their way into print. Robert Gibbs, the president’s press secretary told reporters that McChrystal has “made an enormous mistake in judgment to which he’s going to have to answer. The purpose of calling him here [to the White House] is to see what in the world he was thinking.” It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to determine what McChrystal and his staff are thinking about the way the Obama White House is handling the war. It’s pretty much the same thing that a large number of Americans are thinking, given the dilly-dallying in which the Obamites engaged. It’s clear that Obama is not overly comfortable with conducting a war, other than the scurrilous attacks he launches against his hapless perceived enemies, such as bankers, Wall St. types, doctors, insurance companies and now Big Oil. It seems that the president finds a shooting war so distasteful that he is loath to make decisions on how to best prosecute that war. How else could one explain McChrystal’s appointment to head the Afghan War with orders to submit a plan that would bring a swift end to the conflict and then wait for an interminable amount of time before the plan is even read? What’s interesting is that in his efforts to further his legislative agenda domestically, Obama behaved as if we were at war, passing TARP, stimulus and healthcare legislation in the shortest possible time by urging the Congress to do so, lest the nation would perish, even if some of that legislation doesn’t actually take effect until 2014. Yet when there is a real war in which people are actually killed, the president allows himself the luxury of carefully weighing his options. As I recall, McChrystal asked for 60,000 troops and the president settled on 30,000 and then imposed a withdrawal date of July 2011, which only served to embolden the Taliban, as they realized that Obama was no George W. Bush. It’s also likely that Obama was acting disingenuously, when during the presidential campaign he claimed that the Afghan war was the “real war” and that the Iraq invasion was a mistake. If he really meant that the Afghan war was worth prosecuting, why is it that he wouldn’t take McChrystal’s recommendation to send 60,000 troops, rather than only half that many? So all this explains why those charged with prosecuting the war in Afghanistan would feel contemptuous of their political masters. But, as I stated above, the bigger question is what will Obama do about it? Will he accept the general’s resignation and appoint a new commander? Will he fire McChrystal? Or will he kiss and make up by accepting McChrystal’s apology? Don't think that Obama, unlike Harry Truman who fired Douglas MacArthur, has the stones to fire a popular general. The Arabs have a saying that it’s better to have someone standing inside your tent peeing out than outside peeing in. Can Obama afford to have McChrystal appear on Fox News with criticism of his leadership night after night between now and the midterms? I don’t think so. For that reason Obama will decide that McChrystal will stay.