[Peace-discuss] Obama's General

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This article helps to give us an account of what our government is actually 
doing in the Middle East. It should be read with an article in the current 
Nation: "Iraq's New Death Squad," by Shane Bauer 
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090622/bauer>. --CGE]


"Our self-anointed 'agent of change' has changed into what his predecessor was: 
a fawning servant of America’s warlords."

	Our McMan in Bananastan
	by Jeff Huber, June 09, 2009

Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our new Bananastan war chief, may be more dangerous 
and even crazier than his boss, Gen. David Petraeus of Central Command. 
McChrystal reportedly eats one meal a day and sleeps three hours a night. We 
can’t know for sure if that’s true, but we can assume McChrystal wants us to 
think it is because it comes from the New York Times, who almost certainly got 
it from the press kit McChrystal’s public affairs colonel gave them.

Unconfirmed rumor also has it that McChrystal only drinks rain water to avoid 
the effects of fluoridation on his precious bodily fluids, and that he takes 
acai berry purgatives to maintain his purity of essence. However much of this is 
true or merely legend-crafting, it’s all loony enough to make Petraeus’ one-arm 
pushup contests with teenage privates look dignified in comparison.

 From the sound of McChrystal’s recent confirmation hearing testimony, the 
insanity is just leaving the station. He told the Senate Armed Services 
Committee "I believe [the Afghanistan conflict] is winnable, but I don’t think 
it will be easily winnable.” It won’t be easy to win because it will be 
impossible to tell when we’ve won. “The measure of effectiveness will not be 
enemy killed," McChrystal told the SASC, "it will be the number of Afghans 
shielded from violence." How many shielded Afghans will equate to victory? More 
importantly, who is going to shield them? Certainly not McChrystal.

As commander of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), 
McChrystal was directly responsible for the assassination strikes that have 
killed so many innocents in the Bananastans. Paradoxically, those strikes were 
the reason McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. Mark McKiernan, got the ax. 
Compounding the irony is the way McKiernan came to be cast as the fall stooge.

Throughout our post-9/11 missteps, the JSOC has largely operated outside the 
established chain of command; the only authority it appeared to answer to was 
Dick Cheney. When the Dark Lord left office in January 2009, the JSOC became a 
free agent. By mid-February the mounting outrage over the collateral deaths from 
JSOC strikes forced Vice Adm. William McRaven, who had succeeded McChrystal as 
head of the JSOC in the summer of 2008, to put a temporary halt to them. 
McKiernan’s spokes-colonel Gregory Julian confessed that his boss had not 
ordered the stand-down, and a "senior military official" said Petraeus allowed 
as how throttling back on the baby killing for a couple of weeks was maybe a 
good idea. Those statements from the four-stars made it clear that the 
three-star McRaven was running his own program.

When the stand-down story hit the press in March, Petraeus likely determined 
someone would have to ride the rap for the collateral deaths the JSOC had 
caused, and he didn’t want it to be McRaven or McChrystal, whom he still had use 
for. So Petraeus quietly issued an order that put the JSOC under tactical 
control of McKiernan, which made McKiernan responsible for the McCluster bombs 
McRaven and McChrystal and their howling commandos had created. McKiernan’s 
transfer to Fort Palooka came through in short order, and McChrystal became the 
new McMan in Bananastan. The McHinations didn’t stop there.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he nominated McChrystal because he wanted 
"new military leadership" to go along with the "new strategy." The new strategy 
is the one National Security Adviser James Jones and his White House war wonks 
wretched together. It is a compendium of platitudes, aphorisms, and non 
sequiturs, a fusty heap of "realistic and achievable objectives" that are 
delusional and doomed to failure. We will never establish a "stable 
constitutional government in Pakistan" or a "capable, accountable, and effective 
government in Afghanistan." If by some miracle we manage to create "self-reliant 
Afghan security forces," all we’ll have done is organize another armed mob that 
doesn’t like us. We’re already "involving the international community" for 
reasons that are difficult to fathom. Gates has forged a hobby career out of 
alternately begging NATO for more help in Afghanistan and blaming NATO for 
everything that goes wrong there.

The strategy’s stated aim to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its 
safe havens in Pakistan" is as hallucinatory as it is poorly written. You can’t 
"defeat" a safe haven any more than you can climb a tennis ball; but even if you 
could, there would be no point in doing it. Modern evildoers can run their 
operations from the sanctuary of the pockets that hold their Blackberries. 
Averting "the possibility of extremists obtaining fissile material" is a snipe 
hunt. Evildoers are about as likely to convert Pakistani nukes into suitcase 
bombs as they are to find a cure for herpes.

Yet Stanley McChrystal has sworn to Congress that he can accomplish all these 
things and more if only he can shield enough Afghans from violence. The House 
and Senate Armed Services Committees had a golden opportunity to decapitate 
McChrystal and the Pentagon over their Bananastan plan and torture of detainees 
and the Pat Tillman cover-up and a host of other mortal sins, but they 
vaginalized it. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) made a show of growling at McChrystal 
for a few minutes before he rolled over and begged for a tummy scratch.

Nobody in the legislature had the baby-makers to oppose McChrystal’s nomination, 
because he enjoys the aegis of the most powerful man on earth. As military 
analyst Andrew Bacevich puts it, “McKiernan’s removal confirms that it’s now 
Petraeus’ army," and King David’s hand-picked "unconventional warriors" like 
McChrystal and McRaven are "in the saddle." In 2007, Petraeus purposely misled 
Congress into believing he was seeking a way to bring troops home from Iraq 
while he was actually using the surge as a stratagem to buy time to sell the 
"long war" to the public, and he got away with it. Now he and his protégés 
McChrystal and McRaven are poised to get away with the same shenanigans in the 
Bananastans.

And where does our commander in chief Barack Obama stand on all of this? He’s 
the one who blessed the resumption of the errant air strikes and who nominated 
McChrystal to take over in the Bananastans. Our self-anointed "agent of change" 
has changed into what his predecessor was: a fawning servant of America’s warlords.

http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/06/08/our-mcman-in-bananastan/