[Peace-discuss] Fw: The 36 Hours That Shook Washington

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Sent: Monday, June 28, 2010 9:07 PM
Subject: The 36 Hours That Shook Washington


> The 36 Hours That Shook Washington
> 
> By Frank Rich 
> 
> NY Times Op-Ed: June 27, 2010
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27rich.html?th&emc=th
> 
> THE moment he pulled the trigger, there was
> near-universal agreement that President Obama had done
> the inevitable thing, the right thing and, best of all,
> the bold thing. But before we get carried away with
> relief and elation, let's not forget what we saw in the
> tense 36 hours that fell between late Monday night,
> when word spread of Rolling Stone's blockbuster
> article, and high noon Wednesday, when Obama
> MacArthured his general. That frenzied interlude
> revealed much about the state of Washington, the
> Afghanistan war and the Obama presidency - little of it
> cheering and none of it resolved by the ingenious
> replacement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David
> Petraeus, the only militarily and politically
> bullet-proof alternative.
> 
> What we saw was this: 1) Much of the Beltway
> establishment was blindsided by Michael Hastings's
> scoop, an impressive feat of journalism by a Washington
> outsider who seemed to know more about what was going
> on in Washington than most insiders did; 2) Obama's
> failure to fire McChrystal months ago for both his
> arrogance and incompetence was a grievous mistake that
> illuminates a wider management shortfall at the White
> House; 3) The present strategy has produced no progress
> in this nearly nine-year-old war, even as the monthly
> coalition body count has just reached a new high.
> 
> If we and the president don't absorb these revelations
> and learn from them, the salutary effects of the
> drama's denouement, however triumphant for Obama in the
> short run, will be for naught.
> 
> There were few laughs in the 36 hours of tumult, but
> Jon Stewart captured them with a montage of cable-news
> talking heads expressing repeated shock that an
> interloper from a rock 'n' roll magazine could gain
> access to the war command and induce it to speak with
> self-immolating candor. Politico theorized that
> Hastings had pulled off his impertinent coup because he
> was a freelance journalist rather than a beat reporter,
> and so could risk "burning bridges by publishing many
> of McChrystal's remarks."
> 
> That sentence was edited out of the article - in a
> routine updating, said Politico - after the blogger
> Andrew Sullivan highlighted it as a devastating
> indictment of a Washington media elite too cozy with
> and protective of its sources to report the unvarnished
> news. In any event, Politico had the big picture right.
> It's the Hastings-esque outsiders with no fear of
> burning bridges who have often uncovered the epochal
> stories missed by those with high-level access.
> Woodward and Bernstein were young local reporters,
> nowhere near the White House beat, when they cracked
> Watergate. Seymour Hersh was a freelancer when he broke
> My Lai. It was uncelebrated reporters in Knight
> Ridder's Washington bureau, not journalistic stars
> courted by Scooter and Wolfowitz, who mined low-level
> agency hands to challenge the "slam-dunk" W.M.D.
> intelligence in the run-up to Iraq.
> 
> Symbolically enough, Hastings was reporting his
> McChrystal story abroad just as Beltway media heavies
> and their most bold-faced subjects were dressing up for
> the annual White House correspondents' dinner. Rolling
> Stone has never bought a table or thrown an afterparty
> for that bacchanal, and it has not even had a
> Washington bureau since the mid-1970s. Yet the magazine
> has not only chronicled the McChrystal implosion - and
> relentlessly tracked the administration's connections
> to the "vampire squid" of Goldman Sachs - but has also
> exposed the shoddy management of the Obama Interior
> Department. As it happens, the issue of Rolling Stone
> with the Hastings story also contains a second
> installment of Tim Dickinson's devastating dissection
> of the Ken Salazar cohort, this time detailing how its
> lax regulation could soon lead to an even uglier repeat
> of the Gulf of Mexico fiasco when BP and Shell commence
> offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
> 
> The Interior Department follies will end promptly only
> if Obama has learned the lessons of the attenuated
> McChrystal debacle. Lesson No. 1 should be to revisit
> some of his initial hiring decisions. The general's
> significant role in the Pentagon's politically
> motivated cover-up of Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death
> in 2004 should have been disqualifying from the start.
> The official investigation into that scandal - finding
> that McChrystal peddled "inaccurate and misleading
> assertions" - was unambiguous and damning.
> 
> Once made the top commander in Afghanistan, the general
> was kept on long past his expiration date. He should
> have been cashiered after he took his first public shot
> at Joe Biden during a London speaking appearance last
> October. That's when McChrystal said he would not
> support the vice president's more limited war strategy,
> should the president choose it over his own. According
> to Jonathan Alter in his book "The Promise,"
> McChrystal's London remarks also disclosed information
> from a C.I.A. report that the general "had no authority
> to declassify." These weren't his only offenses.
> McChrystal had gone on a showboating personal publicity
> tour that culminated with "60 Minutes" - even as his
> own histrionic Afghanistan recommendation somehow
> leaked to Bob Woodward, disrupting Obama's war
> deliberations. The president was livid, Alter writes,
> but McChrystal was spared because of a White House
> consensus that he was naive, not "out of control."
> 
> We now know, thanks to Hastings, that the general was
> out of control and the White House was naive. The price
> has been huge. The McChrystal cadre's utter distaste
> for its civilian colleagues on the war team was an ipso
> facto death sentence for the general's signature
> counterinsurgency strategy. You can't engage in nation
> building without civilian partnership. As Rachel Maddow
> said last week of McChrystal, "the guy who was
> promoting and leading the counterinsurgency strategy
> has shown by his actions that even he doesn't believe
> in it."
> 
> This fundamental contradiction helps explain some of
> the war's failures under McChrystal's aborted command,
> including the inability to hold Marja (pop. 60,000),
> which he had vowed to secure in pure counterinsurgency
> fashion by rolling out a civilian "government in a box"
> after troops cleared it of the Taliban. Such is the
> general's contempt for leadership outside his orbit
> that it extends even to our allies. The Hastings
> article opens with McChrystal mocking the French at a
> time when every ally's every troop is a precious,
> dwindling commodity in Afghanistan.
> 
> In the 36 hours between the Rolling Stone bombshell and
> McChrystal's firing, some perennial war cheerleaders in
> the Beltway establishment, including the editorial page
> of The Washington Post and Michael O'Hanlon of the
> Brookings Institution, did rally to the general's
> defense and implored Obama to keep him in place. George
> Stephanopoulos, reflecting a certain strain of received
> Beltway wisdom, warned on ABC that the president risked
> looking "thin-skinned and petulant" if he fired
> McChrystal.
> 
> But none of the general's defenders had an argument for
> him or the war beyond staying the course, poor as the
> results have been. What McChrystal's supporters most
> seemed to admire was his uniquely strong relationship
> with Hamid Karzai, our Afghanistan puppet. As if to
> prove the point, Karzai was the most visible lobbyist
> for McChrystal's survival last week. He was matched by
> his corrupt half-brother, the reported opium kingpin
> Ahmed Wali Karzai, who chimed in to publicly declare
> McChrystal "honest." Was Rod Blagojevich unavailable as
> a character witness?
> 
> You have to wonder whether McChrystal's defenders in
> Washington even read Hastings's article past its
> inflammatory opening anecdotes. If so, they would have
> discovered that the day before the Marja offensive, the
> general's good pal Hamid Karzai kept him waiting for
> hours so he could finish a nap before signing off on
> the biggest military operation of the year. Poor
> McChrystal was reduced to begging another official to
> wake the sleeping president so he could get on with the
> show.
> 
> The war, supported by a steadily declining minority of
> Americans, has no chance of regaining public favor
> unless President Obama can explain why American blood
> and treasure should be at the mercy of this napping
> Afghan president. Karzai stole an election, can't
> provide a government in or out of a box, and has in
> recent months threatened to defect to the Taliban and
> accused American forces of staging rocket attacks on
> his national peace conference. Until last week, Obama's
> only real ally in making his case was public apathy.
> Next to unemployment and the oil spill, Karzai and
> Afghanistan were but ticks on our body politic, even as
> the casualty toll passed 1,000. As a senior McChrystal
> adviser presciently told Hastings, "If Americans pulled
> back and started paying attention to this war, it would
> become even less popular."
> 
> To appreciate how shielded Americans have been from
> Afghanistan, revisit Rahm Emanuel's appearance last
> Sunday morning on "This Week," just before the
> McChrystal firestorm erupted. Trying to put a positive
> spin on the war, the president's chief of staff said
> that the Afghans were at long last meeting their army
> and police quotas. Technically that's true; the numbers
> are up. But in that same day's Washington Post, a
> correspondent in Kandahar reported that the Afghan
> forces there are poorly equipped, corrupt,
> directionless and infiltrated by Taliban sympathizers
> and spies. Kandahar (pop. 1 million) is supposed to be
> the site of the next major American offensive.
> 
> The gaping discrepancy between Emanuel's upbeat
> assessment and the reality on the ground went
> unremarked because absolutely no one was paying
> attention. Everyone is now. That, at least, gives us
> reason to hope that the president's first bold move to
> extricate America from the graveyard of empires won't
> be his last. 
> 
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