On McChrystal and Petraeus

I can’t pass on the chance to say a few things about the firing of General McChrystal. I don’t think President Obama could have not fired him, leaving him in charge of our war effort in state where he clearly lacks the confidence of the President, his cabinet, the people, and quite probably his own soldiers. I knew few soldiers who had strong partisan views, but fewer who held much respect for conduct like this. More than a few must have mentally run through their checklist of the Army Values and realized that the first three are “loyalty,” “duty,” and “respect.” As many others have already said, the military leadership must respect and subordinate itself to the elected political branches. It is of no consequence that you might just agree with the substance of McChrystal’s views about, say, Joe Biden (if I’m guessing right, so does President Obama in his tiny sphere of privacy). The decision to fire McChrystal was an obvious one, and President Obama seems to have done it with about the right combination of force and tact.

The harder question was replacing McChrystal without confusing the command structure or the flow of operations, or suggesting a lack of commitment to the greater effort. Here, the choice of General Petraeus clearly satisfies the latter criterion, and probably both of the former ones.

Here, I marvel at how much this President’s views about Iraq have shifted since he, his Vice President, and his Secretary of State were senators using Petraeus as a campaign foil to please their anti-war base. To President Obama’s eternal credit as a patriot, he abandoned that base in their alternative reality, one in which their desperate quest for defeat does not have consequences for the rest of us. I can’t think of a more cogent statement about the state of matters in Iraq today than the choice of Petraeus as the man who might turn things around in Afghanistan, too. I hope he can do it. This time, we are unburdened of the silly post-hoc arguments that hobbled us in Iraq. This time, there’s no argument that Afghanistan has nothing to do with the security of the United States, no hyperventilation that some long-gone president and his oily cabal fed us all a lie to corner the global rug market. People plotted the murder of 3,000 of us from Afghanistan. They’ll do far worse if we choose to let them.

Still, we should remember that Petraeus’s success in Iraq is also a function of luck. He showed up at the right time. Most societies grow tired of wars after a few years, especially wars fought where they live. War fatigue almost defeated us, but it was probably a very big part of what made conditions right for the Awakening. Still, let’s not take away from Petraeus that he had the the savvy to sense opportunity and exploit it.