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McChrystal Out, Petraeus In


TheLizard

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WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sacked his loose-lipped Afghanistan commander Wednesday, a seismic shift for the military order in wartime, and chose the familiar, admired — and tightly disciplined — Gen. David Petraeus to replace him. Petraeus, architect of the Iraq war turnaround, was once again to take hands-on leadership of a troubled war effort.

Obama said bluntly that Gen. Stanley McChrystal's scornful remarks about administration officials represent conduct that "undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system."

He fired the commander after summoning him from Afghanistan for a face to face meeting in the Oval Office and named Petraeus, the Central Command chief who was McChrystal's direct boss, to step in. Obama had offered the job to Petraeus during a private White House meeting earlier Wednesday, said a senior military official.

In a statement expressing praise for McChrystal yet certainty he had to go, Obama said he did not make the decision over any disagreement in policy or "out of any sense of personal insult." Flanked by Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the Rose Garden, he said: "War is bigger than any one man or woman, whether a private, a general, or a president."

He urged the Senate to confirm Petraeus swiftly and emphasized the Afghanistan strategy he announced in December was not shifting with McChrystal's departure.

"This is a change in personnel but it is not a change in policy," Obama said.

Indeed, as Obama was speaking, McChrystal released a statement saying that he resigned out of "a desire to see the mission succeed."

"I strongly support the president's strategy in Afghanistan," McChrystal said.

Obama hit several grace notes about McChrystal and his service after their Oval Office meeting, saying that he made the decision to sack him "with considerable regret." And yet, he said the job in Afghanistan cannot be done now under McChrystal's leadership, asserting that the critical remarks from the general and his inner circle in the Rolling Stone magazine article displayed conduct that doesn't live up to the standards for a command-level officer.

"I welcome debate among my team, but I won't tolerate division," Obama said.

The announcement came during what is on pace to be the deadliest month for the U.S.-dominated international coalition in Afghanistan. NATO announced eight more international troop deaths Wednesday for a total of 75 this month — matching the toll of the deadliest month of the nine-year-long war, in July 2009. Forty-five of those killed this month were Americans. The U.S. has 90,800 troops in Afghanistan.

Obama seemed to suggest that McChrystal's military career is over, saying the nation should be grateful "for his remarkable career in uniform" as if that has drawn to a close.

McChrystal left the White House after the meeting and returned to his military quarters at Washington's Fort McNair. A senior military official said there is no immediate decision about whether he would retire from the Army, which has been his entire career. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Petraeus, who attended a formal Afghanistan war meeting at the White House on Wednesday, has had overarching responsibility for the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq as head of Central Command. He was to vacate the Central Command post after his expected confirmation, giving Obama another key opening to fill. The Afghanistan job is actually a step down from his current post but one that filled Obama's pre-eminent need.

Petraeus is the nation's best-known military man, having risen to prominence as the commander who turned around the Iraq war in 2007, applying a counterinsurgency strategy that has been adapted for Afghanistan.

He has a reputation for rigorous discipline. He keeps a punishing pace — spending more than 300 days on the road last year. He briefly collapsed during Senate testimony last week, apparently from dehydration. It was a rare glimpse of weakness for a man known as among the military's most driven.

In the hearing last week, Petraeus told Congress he would recommend delaying the pullout of U.S. forces from Afghanistan beginning in July 2011 if need be, saying security and political conditions in Afghanistan must be ready to handle a U.S. drawdown.

That does not mean Petraeus is opposed to bringing some troops home, and he said repeatedly that he supports Obama's revamped Afghanistan strategy. Petraeus' caution is rooted in the fact that the uniformed military — and counterinsurgency specialists in particular — have always been uncomfortable with rigid parameters.

By pairing the decision on McChrystal's departure with the name of his replacement, Obama is seeking to move on quickly and assure Afghans, U.S. allies and a restive American electorate that a firm hand is running the war.

Waheed Omar, spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said Petraeus "will also be a trusted partner." Karzai had been a lonely voice in speaking out in support of McChrystal. But Omar said of Petraeus: "He is the most informed person and the most obvious choice for this job" now that McChrystal is out.

In the magazine article, McChrystal called the period last fall when the president was deciding whether to approve more troops "painful" and said the president appeared ready to hand him an "unsellable" position. McChrystal also said he was "betrayed" by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, the man the White House chose to be his diplomatic partner in Afghanistan.

He accused Eikenberry of raising doubts about Karzai only to give himself cover in case the U.S. effort failed. "Now, if we fail, they can say 'I told you so,'" McChrystal told the magazine. And he was quoted mocking Vice President Joe Biden.

If not insubordination, the remarks — as well as even sharper commentary about Obama and his White House from several in McChrystal's inner circle — were at the least an extraordinary challenge from a military leader. The capital hadn't seen a similar public contretemps between a president and a top wartime commander since Harry Truman stripped Gen. Douglas MacArthur of his command more than a half-century ago after disagreements over Korean war strategy.

Despite McChrystal's military achievements, he has a history of making waves. Last fall, as Obama was weighing how to adjust Afghanistan policy, McChrystal spoke bluntly and publicly about his desire for more troops — earning a scolding from the president, who felt the general was trying to box him into a corner.

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  • 2 weeks later...

:laughing: First time Michael Steele has been accused of having that. He's right (in that it's unwinnable, not that it's a war of Obama's choosing. He's choosing to lengthen it, which is stupid, but he can't be blamed for inheriting it.), but he's in deep s**t now with the GOP for saying the opposite of what he's been programmed to say.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Looks like Wikileaks is going strong with the latest release of information about the quagmire in the Middle East:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703940904575395500694117006.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Julian Assange, the editor of the WikiLeaks website that on Monday released some 92,000 classified military documents, has told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that he "loved crushing bastards." We wonder if the "bastards" he has in mind include the dozens of Afghan civilians named in the document dump as U.S. military informants. Their lives, as well as those of their entire families, are now at terrible risk of Taliban reprisal.

The past decade has seen more than its share of debates about the government's right to secrecy, the public's right to disclosure, and where the line between them should be drawn: Think warrantless wiretaps, Swift bank codes and terror financing, Valerie Plame, Judy Miller. We've had our say on all of these issues.

But the WikiLeaks story is a new and troubling event. Our initial reaction was that the documents expose no big lies about the war and, judging from what we've seen so far, no small ones either. They reveal nothing that wasn't already widely known about Iranian and Pakistani support for the Taliban. In other words, their value in terms of the public's right to know is de minimis.

But the closer we and others have looked at the documents, it's clear that the WikiLeaks dump does reveal a great deal about the military's methods, sources, tactics and protocols of communication. Such details are of little interest to the public at large, and they are unlikely to change many minds about the conduct, or wisdom, of the war. But they are of considerable interest to America's avowed enemies and strategic competitors such as Russia and China.

"If I had gotten this trove on the Taliban or al Qaeda, I would have called this priceless," says former CIA director Michael Hayden. "If I'm head of the Russian intelligence, I'm getting my best English speakers and saying: 'Read every document, and I want you to tell me, how good are these guys? What are their approaches, their strengths, their weaknesses and their blind spots?'"

In his defense, Mr. Assange dismisses concerns about harm to U.S. national security, calling it ridiculous. That may be his right as an Australian national, although Australia deploys some 1,500 troops to Afghanistan and has lost more than two dozen men in combat. But Mr. Assange also says he takes threats to individual safety seriously, and he boasts that he has withheld or edited thousands of documents as a precaution against potential harm.

If so, he hasn't done a very good job of it. Yesterday, the Times of London noted that "in just two hours of searching the WikiLeaks archive, The Times found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to U.S. forces. Their villages are given for identification and also, in many cases, their fathers' names."

The newspaper goes on to note that "named Afghans offered information accusing others of being Taliban. In one case from 2007, a senior official accuses named figures in the government of corruption. In another from 2007, a report describes using a middleman to talk to an alleged Taliban commander who is identified. '[X] said that he would be killed if he got caught interacting with any coalition forces, which is why he hides when we go into [Y].'" The deletions here were done by the London Times, not WikiLeaks.

Perhaps the various countries that host WikiLeaks' servers can provide these informers and their entire families with refugee status now that their lives are in jeopardy. We'd say something similar about the New York Times, Britain's Guardian and Germany's Der Spiegel, which coordinated publication of the documents with Mr. Assange. The Times has made a show of seeking to corroborate the information it published, and to delete information the paper believed was especially sensitive (including the names of Afghan informants). It went so far as to urge Mr. Assange not to publish certain documents.

We don't believe in prior restraint, but it is worth asking whether the Times, the Guardian or Der Spiegel are really serving the public, much less allied security interests, in validating Mr. Assange's methods by flying in publishing formation with him. "I don't know, and I'll bet they [WikiLeaks] don't know, if publication of this mass of material is in some ways genuinely harmful to national security," Floyd Abrams, the well-known First Amendment lawyer, told the Journal yesterday. "That's one of my problems with their modus operandi."

Mr. Abrams went on to defend the behavior of the Times, which he credited for urging Mr. Assange not to publish certain documents. However, years after the Times exposed the Swift financing operation—an act we criticized at the time—we have still found no public benefit from that report. The most notable consequence is that Europe stopped cooperating with the U.S. on the program.

The Pentagon now says it is aggressively pursuing the source of the leak, and we hope the leaker is found and punished. As for Mr. Assange, governments should not be in the business of prosecuting publishers, a la Britain's Official Secrets Act. But publishers should also understand that their rights to publish depend in part on publics that believe their media are doing a public service.

If American voters come to believe that newspapers or websites are cavalier about putting U.S. soldiers or allies at risk against our enemies, politicians will follow the public mood. The press will put its own freedom in jeopardy.

Hahahahah. "Crushing bastards" :rockon:

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