http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/04/gen_mcchrystal_weve_shot_an_amazing_number_of_peop.php
Gen. McChrystal: We've Shot 'An Amazing Number Of People' Who Were Not Threats
Justin Elliott | April 2, 2010
In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."
The comments came during a virtual town hall with troops in Afghanistan after one asked McChrystal to comment on the "escalation of force" problem. The general responded that, in the nine months he had been in charge, none of the cases in which "we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it."
In many cases, he added, families were in the vehicles that were fired on.
Every two weeks, McChrystal participates in a virtual town hall in which soldiers in Afghanistan submit questions by chat that he answers over streaming audio.
TPMmuckraker has obtained a fuller transcript of the comments, which were first reported by the New York Times last week. The Times' Richard Oppel noted that since last summer U.S. and NATO troops killed 30 and wounded 80 Afghans in convoy and checkpoint shootings.
In response to a question about reducing such incidents, McChrystal told troops listening to the town hall:
"We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it."
He continued: "That doesn't mean I'm criticizing the people who are executing. I'm just giving you perspective. We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."
Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for McChrystal said in an email to TPMmuckraker that "the general was urging his forces to exercise courageous restraint (by suggesting that it is unlikely that erratic behavior at a checkpoint constitutes a threat) while also expressing sympathy for the confusing and threatening situations in which both soldiers and Afghans find themselves."
Sholtis added that McChrystal "works harder at reducing civilian casualties than any wartime commander in a generation."
Here is the full exchange, from the transcript provided by Sholtis:
Q: "On Escalation of force, have you considered engaging the local community on the issue? We could explain at the brigade/battalion level what behavior we find threatening, and how we are trained to react when we feel threatened. We could negotiate with the community leaders over mutually agreeable actions and reactions that are better understood by both and gives part ownership of the issue to the community and empowers them in line with our approach to reintegration."
GEN McChrystal: "That's a great point. I don't know if we have, but we certainly ought to be doing that. We have so many escalation of force issues, and someone gets hurt in the process, and we say, 'They didn't respond like they were supposed to.' Well, they may not have known how they were supposed to respond, so as they approached an area or checkpoint or whatever, they may have taken actions that seemed appropriate to them, and when a warning shot was fired they may have panicked. I think this is a great thing to do, to engage people and tell them the kind of behavior on their part that would lower the chance that they would run into problems.
"I do want to say something that everyone understands. We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. That doesn't mean I'm criticizing the people who are executing. I'm just giving you perspective. We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."
Showing posts with label Stanley McChrystal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stanley McChrystal. Show all posts
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
"Obama’s Wars”: The Real Story Bob Woodward Won’t Tell
http://whowhatwhy.com/2010/09/30/%e2%80%9cobama%e2%80%99s-wars%e2%80%9d-the-real-story-bob-woodward-won%e2%80%99t-tell/
"Obama’s Wars”: The Real Story Bob Woodward Won’t Tell
Russ Baker
September 30, 2010
Just one year before the publication of “Obama’s Wars,” Bob Woodward became a player in his own book-in-progress. He morphed into his true identity: Warrior Bob. Actually, there’s an even deeper persona, Agent Woodward?—?but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
In June of 2009, Woodward traveled to Afghanistan with General Jim Jones, President Obama’s National Security adviser, to meet with General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of forces there. Why did Jones allow this journalist to accompany him? Because Jones knew that Woodward could be counted on to deliver the company line?—?the military line. In fact, Jones was essentially Woodward’s patron.
The New Republic’s Gabriel Sherman wrote at the time that
…Jones was a guest of Woodward at his wife Elsa Walsh’s fiftieth birthday party held at Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee’s house. He and Elsa were glued to Jones at the cocktail party before the dinner started…
In September of last year, McChrystal (or someone close to him) leaked to Woodward a document that essentially forced President Obama’s hand. Obama wanted time to consider all options on what to do about Afghanistan. But the leak, publicizing the military’s “confidential” assertion that a troop increase was essential, cast the die, and Obama had to go along. Nobody was happier than the Pentagon?—?and, it should be said, its allies in the vast military contracting establishment.
The website Firedoglake chronicled the developments in a pungent essay:
Apparently General McChrystal and the Petraeus cabal aren’t willing to wait for their Commander in Chief to set the strategy. Prior to the President’s interviews, McChrystal’s people were already telling journalists that they were “impatient with Obama” as Nancy Youssef reported. This “Power Play,” as I mentioned last night, included a veiled threat that McChrystal would resign if he didn’t get his way.
And sure enough, just hours after the Commander in Chief was on the airwaves, somehow McChrystal’s classified report hit the Washington Post … compliments of Bob Woodward no less.
Wow, what a coincidence!
This episode highlights a crucial aspect of Bob Woodward’s career that has been ignored by most of the media. Simply put, Woodward is the military’s man, and always has been.
For almost four decades, under cover of his supposedly “objective” reporting, Woodward has represented the viewpoints of the military and intelligence establishments. Often he has done so in the context of complex inside maneuvering of which he gives his readers little clue. He did it with the book Veil, about CIA director William Casey, in which he relied on Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a rival of Casey’s, as his key source. (Inman, from Texas, was closely identified with the Bush faction of the CIA.) The book was based in part on a “deathbed interview” with Casey that Casey’s widow and former CIA guards said never took place.
Typically, Woodward uses information he gets from his main sources to gain access to others. He then gets more secrets from them, and so on down the line. His stature?—?if that’s the word?—?as a repository of this inside dope has been key to the relentless success machine that his media colleagues have perpetuated. The New York Times review of his Obama book laid out the formula:
In Obama’s Wars, Mr. Woodward, as usual, eschews analysis and commentary. Instead, he hews to his I Am a Tape Recorder technique, using his insider access to give readers interested in inside-the-Beltway politics lots of granular detail harvested from interviews conducted on background, as well as leaked memos, meeting notes and other documents. Some of this information is revealing about the interplay of personality and policy and politics in Washington; some of it is just self-serving spin. As he’s done in his earlier books, Mr. Woodward acknowledges that attributions of thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person were in some cases not obtained directly from that person, but from notes or from a colleague whom the person told?—?a questionable but increasingly popular method, which means the reader should take the reconstructed scenes with a grain of salt.
And then, thanks to all this attention, and even with that grain of salt, the book went to #1.
But might there be more to Woodward and his oeuvre than just questionable work practices? Well, let’s see. Woodward granted former CIA director George H.W. Bush a pass by excluding him from accounts of Iran-Contra, which occurred while the notorious intriguer was vice president under the notoriously hands-off Ronald Reagan. (When I asked Woodward about this for my book Family of Secrets, he replied, “Bush was…What was it he said at the time? I was out of the loop?”) Later Woodward got exclusive access to H.W.’s son. He spent more time with George W. Bush than did any other journalist, writing several largely sympathetic books about his handling of Iraq and Afghanistan before playing catch-up with prevailing sentiment and essentially reversing course.
Now, for a bit of cognitive dissonance. Woodward’s signature achievement?-?bringing down Richard Nixon?-?turns out not to be what we all thought. If that comes as a surprise, you have missed a few books, including bestsellers, that put pieces of this puzzle together. (Family of Secrets has several chapters on the real Watergate story, but there are others that present detailed information, including those by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, James Rosen, Jim Hougan and others.)
Here’s the deal: Bob, top secret Naval officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of, and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, Woodward’s military bosses are running a spy ring inside the White House that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger’s secret negotiations with America’s enemies (China, Soviet Union, etc), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They then give what they stole to columnist Jack Anderson and others in the press.
That’s not the iconic Woodward of legend, of course?—?so it takes a while for this notion to settle in the mind. But there’s more?—?and it’s even more troubling. Did you know there was really no Deep Throat, that the Mark Felt story was conjured up as yet another layer of cover in what became a daisy chain of disinformation? Did you know that Richard Nixon was loathed and feared by the military brass, that they and their allies were desperate to get Nixon out and halt his rapprochement with the Communists? That a bunch of operatives with direct or indirect CIA/military connections, from E. Howard Hunt to Alexander Butterfield to John Dean?—?wormed their way into key White House posts, and started up the Keystone Kops operations that would be laid at Nixon’s office door?
Believe me, I understand. It sounds like the “conspiracy theory” stuff that we have been trained to dismiss. But I’ve just spent five years on a heavily documented forensic dig into this missing strata of American history, and I myself have had to come to terms with the enormous gap between reality and the “reality” presented by the media and various establishment gatekeepers who tell us what’s what.
Given this complicity, it’s no surprise that when it comes to Woodward’s latest work, the myth-making machine is on auto pilot. The public, of course, will end up as confused and manipulated as ever. And so things will continue, same as they ever were. Endless war, no substantive reforms. Unless we wake up to our own victimhood.
"Obama’s Wars”: The Real Story Bob Woodward Won’t Tell
Russ Baker
September 30, 2010
Just one year before the publication of “Obama’s Wars,” Bob Woodward became a player in his own book-in-progress. He morphed into his true identity: Warrior Bob. Actually, there’s an even deeper persona, Agent Woodward?—?but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
In June of 2009, Woodward traveled to Afghanistan with General Jim Jones, President Obama’s National Security adviser, to meet with General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of forces there. Why did Jones allow this journalist to accompany him? Because Jones knew that Woodward could be counted on to deliver the company line?—?the military line. In fact, Jones was essentially Woodward’s patron.
The New Republic’s Gabriel Sherman wrote at the time that
…Jones was a guest of Woodward at his wife Elsa Walsh’s fiftieth birthday party held at Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee’s house. He and Elsa were glued to Jones at the cocktail party before the dinner started…
In September of last year, McChrystal (or someone close to him) leaked to Woodward a document that essentially forced President Obama’s hand. Obama wanted time to consider all options on what to do about Afghanistan. But the leak, publicizing the military’s “confidential” assertion that a troop increase was essential, cast the die, and Obama had to go along. Nobody was happier than the Pentagon?—?and, it should be said, its allies in the vast military contracting establishment.
The website Firedoglake chronicled the developments in a pungent essay:
Apparently General McChrystal and the Petraeus cabal aren’t willing to wait for their Commander in Chief to set the strategy. Prior to the President’s interviews, McChrystal’s people were already telling journalists that they were “impatient with Obama” as Nancy Youssef reported. This “Power Play,” as I mentioned last night, included a veiled threat that McChrystal would resign if he didn’t get his way.
And sure enough, just hours after the Commander in Chief was on the airwaves, somehow McChrystal’s classified report hit the Washington Post … compliments of Bob Woodward no less.
Wow, what a coincidence!
This episode highlights a crucial aspect of Bob Woodward’s career that has been ignored by most of the media. Simply put, Woodward is the military’s man, and always has been.
For almost four decades, under cover of his supposedly “objective” reporting, Woodward has represented the viewpoints of the military and intelligence establishments. Often he has done so in the context of complex inside maneuvering of which he gives his readers little clue. He did it with the book Veil, about CIA director William Casey, in which he relied on Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a rival of Casey’s, as his key source. (Inman, from Texas, was closely identified with the Bush faction of the CIA.) The book was based in part on a “deathbed interview” with Casey that Casey’s widow and former CIA guards said never took place.
Typically, Woodward uses information he gets from his main sources to gain access to others. He then gets more secrets from them, and so on down the line. His stature?—?if that’s the word?—?as a repository of this inside dope has been key to the relentless success machine that his media colleagues have perpetuated. The New York Times review of his Obama book laid out the formula:
In Obama’s Wars, Mr. Woodward, as usual, eschews analysis and commentary. Instead, he hews to his I Am a Tape Recorder technique, using his insider access to give readers interested in inside-the-Beltway politics lots of granular detail harvested from interviews conducted on background, as well as leaked memos, meeting notes and other documents. Some of this information is revealing about the interplay of personality and policy and politics in Washington; some of it is just self-serving spin. As he’s done in his earlier books, Mr. Woodward acknowledges that attributions of thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person were in some cases not obtained directly from that person, but from notes or from a colleague whom the person told?—?a questionable but increasingly popular method, which means the reader should take the reconstructed scenes with a grain of salt.
And then, thanks to all this attention, and even with that grain of salt, the book went to #1.
But might there be more to Woodward and his oeuvre than just questionable work practices? Well, let’s see. Woodward granted former CIA director George H.W. Bush a pass by excluding him from accounts of Iran-Contra, which occurred while the notorious intriguer was vice president under the notoriously hands-off Ronald Reagan. (When I asked Woodward about this for my book Family of Secrets, he replied, “Bush was…What was it he said at the time? I was out of the loop?”) Later Woodward got exclusive access to H.W.’s son. He spent more time with George W. Bush than did any other journalist, writing several largely sympathetic books about his handling of Iraq and Afghanistan before playing catch-up with prevailing sentiment and essentially reversing course.
Now, for a bit of cognitive dissonance. Woodward’s signature achievement?-?bringing down Richard Nixon?-?turns out not to be what we all thought. If that comes as a surprise, you have missed a few books, including bestsellers, that put pieces of this puzzle together. (Family of Secrets has several chapters on the real Watergate story, but there are others that present detailed information, including those by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, James Rosen, Jim Hougan and others.)
Here’s the deal: Bob, top secret Naval officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of, and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, Woodward’s military bosses are running a spy ring inside the White House that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger’s secret negotiations with America’s enemies (China, Soviet Union, etc), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They then give what they stole to columnist Jack Anderson and others in the press.
That’s not the iconic Woodward of legend, of course?—?so it takes a while for this notion to settle in the mind. But there’s more?—?and it’s even more troubling. Did you know there was really no Deep Throat, that the Mark Felt story was conjured up as yet another layer of cover in what became a daisy chain of disinformation? Did you know that Richard Nixon was loathed and feared by the military brass, that they and their allies were desperate to get Nixon out and halt his rapprochement with the Communists? That a bunch of operatives with direct or indirect CIA/military connections, from E. Howard Hunt to Alexander Butterfield to John Dean?—?wormed their way into key White House posts, and started up the Keystone Kops operations that would be laid at Nixon’s office door?
Believe me, I understand. It sounds like the “conspiracy theory” stuff that we have been trained to dismiss. But I’ve just spent five years on a heavily documented forensic dig into this missing strata of American history, and I myself have had to come to terms with the enormous gap between reality and the “reality” presented by the media and various establishment gatekeepers who tell us what’s what.
Given this complicity, it’s no surprise that when it comes to Woodward’s latest work, the myth-making machine is on auto pilot. The public, of course, will end up as confused and manipulated as ever. And so things will continue, same as they ever were. Endless war, no substantive reforms. Unless we wake up to our own victimhood.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Media, Access and McChrystal
http://www.fair.org/blog/2010/06/24/media-access-and-mcchrystal/
Media, Access and McChrystal
06/24/2010
Peter Hart
There's been a discussion (some of it neatly summarized on the Daily Show) of elite journalists' reaction to the explosive comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staffers to Rolling Stone freelancer Michael Hastings. One admission came via a Politico story, captured by NYU's Jay Rosen (6/24/10):
And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.
Rosen notes that this line in the Politico piece was subsequently removed, perhaps because it revealed too much:
Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to "burn bridges" with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down.
This is revealing, perhaps, but completely unsurprising. Journalists have been admitting to this sort of thing for years. Take one example (cited in FAIR's Extra! Update, 12/01) from an American University forum (10/1/01) where PBS correspondent Ray Suarez was asked about the failure to pose difficult questions to certain elite guests:
Well, yeah, access is like oxygen when you're a reporter. And if you're going to do something I guess that's going to jeopardize access in the future, you better be pretty sure that this person who is going to perceive what you are about to do to them as burning them is someone that you can do without in the future after you burn them. That's a tough straddle. It shouldn't be, but it is.
For an example of how a beat reporter normally operates, take ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz's assessment of Gen. David Petraeus (Nightline, 6/23/10):
A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.
Or recall the days when Donald Rumsfeld was considered a rock star by the Washington press corps. FAIR's Steve Rendall ran down the worst of that here:
"Sixty-nine years old, and you're America's stud," Tim Russert told Rumsfeld when he interviewed him on NBC's Meet the Press (1/20/02); Larry King informed him that "you now have this new image called sex symbol" (CNN's Larry King Live, 12/06/01). Fox News' Jim Angle (12/11/01) called him "a babe magnet for the 70-year-old set."
"I love you, Donald," Margaret Carlson announced on CNN's Capital Gang (12/23/01), where the Time magazine columnist appears regularly in the role of left-of-center pundit. Carlson's Time magazine colleague, veteran defense correspondent Mark Thompson, told the Chicago Tribune (10/22/01), "Although he has not told us very much, he has been like a father figure."
Tags: David Petraeus, Politico, Rolling Stone, Stanley McChrystal
Media, Access and McChrystal
06/24/2010
Peter Hart
There's been a discussion (some of it neatly summarized on the Daily Show) of elite journalists' reaction to the explosive comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staffers to Rolling Stone freelancer Michael Hastings. One admission came via a Politico story, captured by NYU's Jay Rosen (6/24/10):
And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.
Rosen notes that this line in the Politico piece was subsequently removed, perhaps because it revealed too much:
Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to "burn bridges" with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down.
This is revealing, perhaps, but completely unsurprising. Journalists have been admitting to this sort of thing for years. Take one example (cited in FAIR's Extra! Update, 12/01) from an American University forum (10/1/01) where PBS correspondent Ray Suarez was asked about the failure to pose difficult questions to certain elite guests:
Well, yeah, access is like oxygen when you're a reporter. And if you're going to do something I guess that's going to jeopardize access in the future, you better be pretty sure that this person who is going to perceive what you are about to do to them as burning them is someone that you can do without in the future after you burn them. That's a tough straddle. It shouldn't be, but it is.
For an example of how a beat reporter normally operates, take ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz's assessment of Gen. David Petraeus (Nightline, 6/23/10):
A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.
Or recall the days when Donald Rumsfeld was considered a rock star by the Washington press corps. FAIR's Steve Rendall ran down the worst of that here:
"Sixty-nine years old, and you're America's stud," Tim Russert told Rumsfeld when he interviewed him on NBC's Meet the Press (1/20/02); Larry King informed him that "you now have this new image called sex symbol" (CNN's Larry King Live, 12/06/01). Fox News' Jim Angle (12/11/01) called him "a babe magnet for the 70-year-old set."
"I love you, Donald," Margaret Carlson announced on CNN's Capital Gang (12/23/01), where the Time magazine columnist appears regularly in the role of left-of-center pundit. Carlson's Time magazine colleague, veteran defense correspondent Mark Thompson, told the Chicago Tribune (10/22/01), "Although he has not told us very much, he has been like a father figure."
Tags: David Petraeus, Politico, Rolling Stone, Stanley McChrystal
Obama Misses the Afghan Exit Ramp
http://consortiumnews.com/2010/062410a.html
Obama Misses the Afghan Exit Ramp
By Ray McGovern
June 24, 2010
Is President Barack Obama so dense that he could not see why Gen. Stanley McChrystal might actually have wanted to be fired — and rescued from the current March of Folly in Afghanistan, a mess much of his own making?
McChrystal leaves behind a long trail of broken promises and unfulfilled expectations. For example, there is no real security, at least during the night, in Marja, which McChrystal devoted enormous resources to conquer this spring.
Remember his boast that he would then bring to Marja a “government-in-box” and offer an object lesson regarding what was in store for those pesky Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city?
But it’s now clear that there will be no offensive against Kandahar anytime soon. On its merits, that is surely a good thing, but it is a huge embarrassment for McChrystal and his former boss, the never nonplussed Gen. David Petraeus.
When McChrystal and his undisciplined senior aides let a Rolling Stone reporter know what they really thought of the “intimidated” Obama and most of his national security team, Obama and his advisers rose to the bait.
They let McChrystal fold his tent in the night and steal silently away from the disaster he leaves behind. White House advisers then came up with the idea of replacing McChrystal in Kabul with the straight-arrow Petraeus whose is known for running a tight command.
Since the announcement Wednesday, the Stanley-out/David-in move has been hailed by Official Washington as a political master stroke, but not for the right reasons.
The conventional wisdom holds that Petraeus is the military genius who can still prevail in Afghanistan, but the real cleverness of the choice is that it dumps in Petraeus’s lap a mess that he also helped create, along with McChrystal and Obama (not to mention, Bush, Cheney, et al).
Petraeus gets a mission that virtually everyone but Sens. John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham realizes is an impossible assignment. It also gets Petraeus out of the country and, the Obama folks hope, out of contention for the 2012 Republican nomination.
Instead of possibly running against what a mess Obama has made of Afghanistan, Petraeus has been put in charge of the mess.
Vietnamistan
Still, the White House maneuver is too clever by half — and is extremely dangerous. It also makes the prospects dimmer for Obama executing a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan beginning in July 2011, as some of the relative doves in his administration had hoped.
In replacing McChrystal with the popular Petraeus, who outnumbers Obama 100 to zero in the merit badges on his left breast, the President has given the sainted general the option of calling for more and more troops and firepower lest we “lose” in Vietnamistan — sorry, Afghanistan.
But where would the additional troops come from, and what would they be able to do that is not already being done?
For those old enough to remember a similar stage in the “counterinsurgency” operation in Vietnam, the ramrod image of Petraeus evokes shivers. He resembles much too closely the American commander in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, an equally handsome gent decked out with all manner of ribbons and medals with which to dazzle Congress in a way that President Lyndon Johnson could not.
A lawsuit after the war demonstrated that Westmoreland deliberately misled Congress by insisting that there were only half as many Vietnamese Communists under arms as his intelligence analysts knew there were.
Westmoreland’s periodic appeals for more and more troops – as he pursued the light at the end of the tunnel – built U.S. forces up to 536,000.
Finally, in early 1968, President Johnson convened more sober and honest advisers who told him Vietnam was a fool’s errand. Johnson finally told Westmoreland “no,” but it was too late. Johnson wound up losing the presidency as well as the war, opening the door to Richard Nixon and all that followed.
In later mea culpas, Johnson’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara bemoaned the fact that as many as three million Vietnamese were killed, as well as over 58,000 American troops. As the contemporary song went, “When will they ever learn?”
Rock and Hard Place
Obama’s main dilemma now is likely to be how to say “no” when, as seems inevitable, Westmoreland — sorry, Petraeus — makes requests for more “surges” of troops into Afghanistan.
Petraeus is likely to tell Obama he must have additional forces, or he will go the way of McChrystal and invite removal — and then possibly run for president in 2012. In that case, Obama’s political advisers would probably say send more troops from wherever they might be scrounged up.
Casualties would rise exponentially; there would never be enough troops; most of those NATO allies that have not already withdrawn their troops would do so. The remaining “coalition forces” would not “prevail” (whatever that means).
And by the end of 2011, the Teflon-as-well-as-merit-badge-clad Petraeus might well quit anyway and join McChrystal in blaming the carnage on the “clowns” around President Obama.
We may well end up with either a President Petraeus or another President Clinton in the person of Obama’s hawkish Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was one official praised by McChrystal’s wild-boy crew because she favored giving the general whatever troops he wanted.
A McChrystal aide is quoted as saying, “She said, ‘If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.’”
Is it possible that Obama can be blissfully unaware of the dangerous political kill zone into which he has maneuvered his presidency?
The tragedy is that all this is unnecessary. If President Obama could get beyond these ill-conceived short-term political considerations, he already has available some well-reasoned guidance as to how to extricate the United States from the Afghanistan morass.
He got solid advice last fall from retired Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, his ambassador in Kabul, who knows more about Afghanistan than Petraeus, McChrystal and special envoy Richard Holbrooke do, put together.
And that knowledge and experience shows through clearly in sensitive cables Eikenberry sent to Washington in early November 2009. It’s telling that the New York Times editorialists have suggested that Obama should include Eikenberry in a “wider housecleaning” of the administration’s Afghan brain trust.
The news columns of the Times, however, do deserve credit for having published the text of Eikenberry’s cables, posted online. To the credit of the Times’ source (reportedly a U.S. official), he/she was able to do a truly patriotic thing to ensure that those interested could learn about what Eikenberry really thought, especially his doubts about the effectiveness of a military escalation.
Clearly, the source saw what ethicists call a “supervening value” in making that unauthorized disclosure to the Times.
Nevertheless, last fall, President Obama apparently put his finger to the prevailing political winds of Washington and chose to go with McChrystal’s counterinsurgency “surge” rather than the advice from Eikenberry and from Vice President Joe Biden, who also opposed the escalation.
Obama sided with McChrystal, Petraeus and Clinton (as well as Defense Secretary Robert Gates), agreeing to triple the U.S. troop levels to about 100,000. In the months that have passed, the levels of American casualties have jumped but the prospects for victory (or some modicum of success) remain stuck in a deepening quagmire.
Now, with some indiscreet comments to Rolling Stone magazine, McChrystal has managed to get plucked from the swamp as if some “deus ex machina” derrick from a Greek tragedy had appeared magically behind stage and lifted the hero out of an impossible situation.
Obama now has turned to what might be called “Petraeus ex machina” to salvage his benighted strategy in Afghanistan, but this new device is unlikely to lift the larger military cause out of grave danger. Instead, many of the U.S. troops committed to this dubious plan seem doomed in what is becoming a real-life tragedy.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the early Sixties and then as a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. He is now a member of the Standing Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Obama Misses the Afghan Exit Ramp
By Ray McGovern
June 24, 2010
Is President Barack Obama so dense that he could not see why Gen. Stanley McChrystal might actually have wanted to be fired — and rescued from the current March of Folly in Afghanistan, a mess much of his own making?
McChrystal leaves behind a long trail of broken promises and unfulfilled expectations. For example, there is no real security, at least during the night, in Marja, which McChrystal devoted enormous resources to conquer this spring.
Remember his boast that he would then bring to Marja a “government-in-box” and offer an object lesson regarding what was in store for those pesky Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city?
But it’s now clear that there will be no offensive against Kandahar anytime soon. On its merits, that is surely a good thing, but it is a huge embarrassment for McChrystal and his former boss, the never nonplussed Gen. David Petraeus.
When McChrystal and his undisciplined senior aides let a Rolling Stone reporter know what they really thought of the “intimidated” Obama and most of his national security team, Obama and his advisers rose to the bait.
They let McChrystal fold his tent in the night and steal silently away from the disaster he leaves behind. White House advisers then came up with the idea of replacing McChrystal in Kabul with the straight-arrow Petraeus whose is known for running a tight command.
Since the announcement Wednesday, the Stanley-out/David-in move has been hailed by Official Washington as a political master stroke, but not for the right reasons.
The conventional wisdom holds that Petraeus is the military genius who can still prevail in Afghanistan, but the real cleverness of the choice is that it dumps in Petraeus’s lap a mess that he also helped create, along with McChrystal and Obama (not to mention, Bush, Cheney, et al).
Petraeus gets a mission that virtually everyone but Sens. John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham realizes is an impossible assignment. It also gets Petraeus out of the country and, the Obama folks hope, out of contention for the 2012 Republican nomination.
Instead of possibly running against what a mess Obama has made of Afghanistan, Petraeus has been put in charge of the mess.
Vietnamistan
Still, the White House maneuver is too clever by half — and is extremely dangerous. It also makes the prospects dimmer for Obama executing a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan beginning in July 2011, as some of the relative doves in his administration had hoped.
In replacing McChrystal with the popular Petraeus, who outnumbers Obama 100 to zero in the merit badges on his left breast, the President has given the sainted general the option of calling for more and more troops and firepower lest we “lose” in Vietnamistan — sorry, Afghanistan.
But where would the additional troops come from, and what would they be able to do that is not already being done?
For those old enough to remember a similar stage in the “counterinsurgency” operation in Vietnam, the ramrod image of Petraeus evokes shivers. He resembles much too closely the American commander in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, an equally handsome gent decked out with all manner of ribbons and medals with which to dazzle Congress in a way that President Lyndon Johnson could not.
A lawsuit after the war demonstrated that Westmoreland deliberately misled Congress by insisting that there were only half as many Vietnamese Communists under arms as his intelligence analysts knew there were.
Westmoreland’s periodic appeals for more and more troops – as he pursued the light at the end of the tunnel – built U.S. forces up to 536,000.
Finally, in early 1968, President Johnson convened more sober and honest advisers who told him Vietnam was a fool’s errand. Johnson finally told Westmoreland “no,” but it was too late. Johnson wound up losing the presidency as well as the war, opening the door to Richard Nixon and all that followed.
In later mea culpas, Johnson’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara bemoaned the fact that as many as three million Vietnamese were killed, as well as over 58,000 American troops. As the contemporary song went, “When will they ever learn?”
Rock and Hard Place
Obama’s main dilemma now is likely to be how to say “no” when, as seems inevitable, Westmoreland — sorry, Petraeus — makes requests for more “surges” of troops into Afghanistan.
Petraeus is likely to tell Obama he must have additional forces, or he will go the way of McChrystal and invite removal — and then possibly run for president in 2012. In that case, Obama’s political advisers would probably say send more troops from wherever they might be scrounged up.
Casualties would rise exponentially; there would never be enough troops; most of those NATO allies that have not already withdrawn their troops would do so. The remaining “coalition forces” would not “prevail” (whatever that means).
And by the end of 2011, the Teflon-as-well-as-merit-badge-clad Petraeus might well quit anyway and join McChrystal in blaming the carnage on the “clowns” around President Obama.
We may well end up with either a President Petraeus or another President Clinton in the person of Obama’s hawkish Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was one official praised by McChrystal’s wild-boy crew because she favored giving the general whatever troops he wanted.
A McChrystal aide is quoted as saying, “She said, ‘If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.’”
Is it possible that Obama can be blissfully unaware of the dangerous political kill zone into which he has maneuvered his presidency?
The tragedy is that all this is unnecessary. If President Obama could get beyond these ill-conceived short-term political considerations, he already has available some well-reasoned guidance as to how to extricate the United States from the Afghanistan morass.
He got solid advice last fall from retired Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, his ambassador in Kabul, who knows more about Afghanistan than Petraeus, McChrystal and special envoy Richard Holbrooke do, put together.
And that knowledge and experience shows through clearly in sensitive cables Eikenberry sent to Washington in early November 2009. It’s telling that the New York Times editorialists have suggested that Obama should include Eikenberry in a “wider housecleaning” of the administration’s Afghan brain trust.
The news columns of the Times, however, do deserve credit for having published the text of Eikenberry’s cables, posted online. To the credit of the Times’ source (reportedly a U.S. official), he/she was able to do a truly patriotic thing to ensure that those interested could learn about what Eikenberry really thought, especially his doubts about the effectiveness of a military escalation.
Clearly, the source saw what ethicists call a “supervening value” in making that unauthorized disclosure to the Times.
Nevertheless, last fall, President Obama apparently put his finger to the prevailing political winds of Washington and chose to go with McChrystal’s counterinsurgency “surge” rather than the advice from Eikenberry and from Vice President Joe Biden, who also opposed the escalation.
Obama sided with McChrystal, Petraeus and Clinton (as well as Defense Secretary Robert Gates), agreeing to triple the U.S. troop levels to about 100,000. In the months that have passed, the levels of American casualties have jumped but the prospects for victory (or some modicum of success) remain stuck in a deepening quagmire.
Now, with some indiscreet comments to Rolling Stone magazine, McChrystal has managed to get plucked from the swamp as if some “deus ex machina” derrick from a Greek tragedy had appeared magically behind stage and lifted the hero out of an impossible situation.
Obama now has turned to what might be called “Petraeus ex machina” to salvage his benighted strategy in Afghanistan, but this new device is unlikely to lift the larger military cause out of grave danger. Instead, many of the U.S. troops committed to this dubious plan seem doomed in what is becoming a real-life tragedy.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the early Sixties and then as a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. He is now a member of the Standing Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
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