As we hear more of the breathless fallout over the McChrystal interview and his staff's foot-in-mouth, you might want to keep in mind the following fact: McChrystal was given the chance to voice objections to the controversial parts of the Rolling Stone article in which drunken aides were quoted, but he signed off anyway.
McChrytal then offered his resignation before Obama ever asked for it, and headed for the White House after being summoned by the reportedly "angry" president."Eric Bates, the magazine's editor, said during an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that McChrystal was informed of the quotes prior to its publication as part of Rolling Stone's standard fact-checking process -- and that the general did not object to or dispute any of the reporting. Asked if McChrystal pushed back on the story, Bates responded: "No, absolutely not." "We ran everything by them in the fact-checking process as we always do," the Rolling Stone editor said.
Wait a minute, Let me get this straight. McChrystal was given the
chance to voice objections to his aides' "shitfaced" comments but
didn't say, "uh, these guys were drunk. I know you are a fair
publication so can some of this be off the record?" Other comments
made during the now famous bus ride were made after agreement that they
be off the record, so the situation would have called for cutting a
little slack, at least as far as the "gotchas."
Now it sounds as if it may have been more like: "hey, you forgot the good one about "bite me.""
So what's really going on here? Are we to believe the explosiveness of these remarks would have escaped someone who has risen to the top of an organization known for some of the most vicious political infighting in the world? What did McChrystal apologize for? For staff making the remarks? Or for him approving them? It is interesting that the aides are never associated by name for their remarks, thus shielding them from an Article 88.
The popular narrative of the party boys getting all chummy with the ruthless reporter they shouldn't have trusted in the first place, then waking up with headaches to see their boss being summoned by the president, falls apart.
Which leaves us with the possibility that this is a show made for the lunkheads in Peoria, to borrow from Mark Twain. I've been had. I was getting caught up in all this civilian versus military control stuff too. It precedes an impending vote on war funding which is making the politicians nervous, judging by how long it is taking them to take the vote. Retiring Chairman of the key House Appropriations Committee David Obey has so far kept the funds bottled up, and is starting to look like the anti-war tactician he began his career as, when he came into Congress as an anti-Vietnam War maverick. It's in the Appropriations Committee's hands now. (House Appropriations Committee Members)
The bill is laced with many crucial and necessary funds for good
program, what peace activists call the "lipstick on the pig" gambit.
The good things need to be separated into another bill, so the war in
Afghanistan can get a clean up-or-down vote.
The mime lays bare what should be clear to most people by now: the
policy in Afghanistan is there ain't no policy, except to keep it going.
Fewer civilian casualties? More American casualties. More firepower
and more civilian casualties? More hatred, more Taliban. As Cindy
Sheehan, who first noticed the McChrystal contradiction, writes, the
little play we just witnessed is an admission that the war is officially "FUBAR."
"
FUBAR: Military slang for: Fu#ked Up Beyond All/Any Repair/Recognition. FUBAR also has a close military acronym: SNAFU: Situation Normal All Fu#ked Up."
MacBeth, er, McChrystal, the Movie, was along the lines of a considered strategy called "Somebody do something!" It goes: "Somebody do something!" -- "What?" -- "ANYTHING! We've got a war vote coming up and it's got to look like something's happening!"
Think our august chamber of Congress couldn't possibly be this vacuous, this shallow when the lives of young Americans hang in the balance? Not to mention thousands of Afghans, not to mention hundreds upon hundreds of billions of your tax dollars which could be used for something else? The same people who are itching to approve war funding just turned down an extension of unemployment benefits.
Nope. Where that money is going is fittin' and proper. Into the hands of Halliburton and Dyncorp, Xe-Blackwater and General Dynamics, who all pony up quite nicely at election time, thank you.
Sheehan writes:
"All of this posturing and speechifying is nothing but a distraction from the fact that our economy is FUBAR, the Gulf of Mexico is FUBAR, the wars are FUBAR..."
All for a war, people now realize, which could be won for the cost of a few months of military spending in the beginning, for carefully-targeted, Afghan-led jobs and development programs. This takes advantage of the fact that almost nobody in Afghanistan really wants to fight, or even likes the Taliban. But if you plop a bunch of foreigners in those foreigner-type uniforms in the middle of a valley, by gosh, they just wouldn't be Afghans if they didn't take a few shots. Nothing personal.
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