far deeper, wider, and with a lot only a DC insider and intrepid reporter
could have known or written.
-Ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27rich.html?th&emc=th
The 36 Hours That Shook Washington
By Frank Rich
NY Times Op-Ed: June 27, 2010
THE moment he pulled the trigger, there was near-universal agreement that
President Obama had done the inevitable thing, the right thing and, best of
all, the bold thing. But before we get carried away with relief and elation,
let's not forget what we saw in the tense 36 hours that fell between late
Monday night, when word spread of Rolling Stone's blockbuster article, and
high noon Wednesday, when Obama MacArthured his general. That frenzied
interlude revealed much about the state of Washington, the Afghanistan war
and the Obama presidency - little of it cheering and none of it resolved by
the ingenious replacement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David
Petraeus, the only militarily and politically bullet-proof alternative.
What we saw was this: 1) Much of the Beltway establishment was blindsided by
Michael Hastings's scoop, an impressive feat of journalism by a Washington
outsider who seemed to know more about what was going on in Washington than
most insiders did; 2) Obama's failure to fire McChrystal months ago for both
his arrogance and incompetence was a grievous mistake that illuminates a
wider management shortfall at the White House; 3) The present strategy has
produced no progress in this nearly nine-year-old war, even as the monthly
coalition body count has just reached a new high.
If we and the president don't absorb these revelations and learn from them,
the salutary effects of the drama's denouement, however triumphant for Obama
in the short run, will be for naught.
There were few laughs in the 36 hours of tumult, but Jon Stewart captured
them with a montage of cable-news talking heads expressing repeated shock
that an interloper from a rock 'n' roll magazine could gain access to the
war command and induce it to speak with self-immolating candor. Politico
theorized that Hastings had pulled off his impertinent coup because he was a
freelance journalist rather than a beat reporter, and so could risk "burning
bridges by publishing many of McChrystal's remarks."
That sentence was edited out of the article - in a routine updating, said
Politico - after the blogger Andrew Sullivan highlighted it as a devastating
indictment of a Washington media elite too cozy with and protective of its
sources to report the unvarnished news. In any event, Politico had the big
picture right. It's the Hastings-esque outsiders with no fear of burning
bridges who have often uncovered the epochal stories missed by those with
high-level access. Woodward and Bernstein were young local reporters,
nowhere near the White House beat, when they cracked Watergate. Seymour
Hersh was a freelancer when he broke My Lai. It was uncelebrated reporters
in Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, not journalistic stars courted by
Scooter and Wolfowitz, who mined low-level agency hands to challenge the
"slam-dunk" W.M.D. intelligence in the run-up to Iraq.
Symbolically enough, Hastings was reporting his McChrystal story abroad just
as Beltway media heavies and their most bold-faced subjects were dressing up
for the annual White House correspondents' dinner. Rolling Stone has never
bought a table or thrown an afterparty for that bacchanal, and it has not
even had a Washington bureau since the mid-1970s. Yet the magazine has not
only chronicled the McChrystal implosion - and relentlessly tracked the
administration's connections to the "vampire squid" of Goldman Sachs - but
has also exposed the shoddy management of the Obama Interior Department. As
it happens, the issue of Rolling Stone with the Hastings story also contains
a second installment of Tim Dickinson's devastating dissection of the Ken
Salazar cohort, this time detailing how its lax regulation could soon lead
to an even uglier repeat of the Gulf of Mexico fiasco when BP and Shell
commence offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
The Interior Department follies will end promptly only if Obama has learned
the lessons of the attenuated McChrystal debacle. Lesson No. 1 should be to
revisit some of his initial hiring decisions. The general's significant role
in the Pentagon's politically motivated cover-up of Pat Tillman's
friendly-fire death in 2004 should have been disqualifying from the start.
The official investigation into that scandal - finding that McChrystal
peddled "inaccurate and misleading assertions" - was unambiguous and
damning.
Once made the top commander in Afghanistan, the general was kept on long
past his expiration date. He should have been cashiered after he took his
first public shot at Joe Biden during a London speaking appearance last
October. That's when McChrystal said he would not support the vice
president's
more limited war strategy, should the president choose it over his own.
According to Jonathan Alter in his book "The Promise," McChrystal's London
remarks also disclosed information from a C.I.A. report that the general
"had no authority to declassify." These weren't his only offenses.
McChrystal had gone on a showboating personal publicity tour that culminated
with "60 Minutes" - even as his own histrionic Afghanistan recommendation
somehow leaked to Bob Woodward, disrupting Obama's war deliberations. The
president was livid, Alter writes, but McChrystal was spared because of a
White House consensus that he was naïve, not "out of control."
We now know, thanks to Hastings, that the general was out of control and the
White House was naïve. The price has been huge. The McChrystal cadre's utter
distaste for its civilian colleagues on the war team was an ipso facto death
sentence for the general's signature counterinsurgency strategy. You can't
engage in nation building without civilian partnership. As Rachel Maddow
said last week of McChrystal, "the guy who was promoting and leading the
counterinsurgency strategy has shown by his actions that even he doesn't
believe in it."
This fundamental contradiction helps explain some of the war's failures
under McChrystal's aborted command, including the inability to hold Marja
(pop. 60,000), which he had vowed to secure in pure counterinsurgency
fashion by rolling out a civilian "government in a box" after troops cleared
it of the Taliban. Such is the general's contempt for leadership outside his
orbit that it extends even to our allies. The Hastings article opens with
McChrystal mocking the French at a time when every ally's every troop is a
precious, dwindling commodity in Afghanistan.
In the 36 hours between the Rolling Stone bombshell and McChrystal's firing,
some perennial war cheerleaders in the Beltway establishment, including the
editorial page of The Washington Post and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings
Institution, did rally to the general's defense and implored Obama to keep
him in place. George Stephanopoulos, reflecting a certain strain of received
Beltway wisdom, warned on ABC that the president risked looking
"thin-skinned and petulant" if he fired McChrystal.
But none of the general's defenders had an argument for him or the war
beyond staying the course, poor as the results have been. What McChrystal's
supporters most seemed to admire was his uniquely strong relationship with
Hamid Karzai, our Afghanistan puppet. As if to prove the point, Karzai was
the most visible lobbyist for McChrystal's survival last week. He was
matched by his corrupt half-brother, the reported opium kingpin Ahmed Wali
Karzai, who chimed in to publicly declare McChrystal "honest." Was Rod
Blagojevich unavailable as a character witness?
You have to wonder whether McChrystal's defenders in Washington even read
Hastings's article past its inflammatory opening anecdotes. If so, they
would have discovered that the day before the Marja offensive, the general's
good pal Hamid Karzai kept him waiting for hours so he could finish a nap
before signing off on the biggest military operation of the year. Poor
McChrystal was reduced to begging another official to wake the sleeping
president so he could get on with the show.
The war, supported by a steadily declining minority of Americans, has no
chance of regaining public favor unless President Obama can explain why
American blood and treasure should be at the mercy of this napping Afghan
president. Karzai stole an election, can't provide a government in or out of
a box, and has in recent months threatened to defect to the Taliban and
accused American forces of staging rocket attacks on his national peace
conference. Until last week, Obama's only real ally in making his case was
public apathy. Next to unemployment and the oil spill, Karzai and
Afghanistan were but ticks on our body politic, even as the casualty toll
passed 1,000. As a senior McChrystal adviser presciently told Hastings, "If
Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would
become even less popular."
To appreciate how shielded Americans have been from Afghanistan, revisit
Rahm Emanuel's appearance last Sunday morning on "This Week," just before
the McChrystal firestorm erupted. Trying to put a positive spin on the war,
the president's chief of staff said that the Afghans were at long last
meeting their army and police quotas. Technically that's true; the numbers
are up. But in that same day's Washington Post, a correspondent in Kandahar
reported that the Afghan forces there are poorly equipped, corrupt,
directionless and infiltrated by Taliban sympathizers and spies. Kandahar
(pop. 1 million) is supposed to be the site of the next major American
offensive.
The gaping discrepancy between Emanuel's upbeat assessment and the reality
on the ground went unremarked because absolutely no one was paying
attention. Everyone is now. That, at least, gives us reason to hope that the
president's first bold move to extricate America from the graveyard of
empires won't be his last.
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