Storm in a teacup in the midst of a hurricane...

Do any of you suspect there's much more to the McChrystal situation than meets the eye? I'm talking about his motives...

Rolling Stone Article’s True Focus: Counterinsurgency

The Rolling Stone profile on Gen. Stanley A. McChyrstal has made civil-military relations a national debate. But an equally important question raised by the article is the limitations of counterinsurgency, or COIN. The article by Michael Hastings article should not be read simply as a profile of a general but also as an indictment on counterinsurgency and the growing dissatisfaction inside the military with COIN theory and its practice in war (though General McChrystal’s replacement on Wednesday, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the leading proponent of counterinsurgency, seemed to indicate there would be no immediate shift away from the strategy).

Hastings points out what a godforesaken mess Afghanistan is, but he deftly underscores that COIN, and specifically the new rules of engagement handed down by McChrystal himself, are confusing and degrading the morale of the troops on the ground. This isn’t something that Barack Obama has done — Hastings notes early in the piece that McChrystal got nearly all the troops he needed for the 2010 surge — this is about the fundamentals of COIN, the very strategy that McChrystal and his patron Gen. David Petraeus, and friends like Gen. Raymond Odierno, own and have been pushing like a ramrod through Afghanistan since 2009.

Two aspects of the McChrystal affair deserve consideration. First, and most obviously, the firing of McChrystal demonstrates the worsening position of the US intervention in Afghanistan. The general would not have been summarily dismissed over a magazine article if the war had been going well.
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The second key element in the McChrystal affair is what it has revealed about the internal state of affairs in the US military. An entire layer has developed in the officer corps and high command, which is openly contemptuous of civilian authority, while their nominal superiors are themselves thoroughly intimidated by military opposition.

Some people seem to think that the question of which uniformed goober is in charge of the imperial bloodbath in Afghanistan is a vitally important issue, worthy of endless exegesis. It is not. It is a meaningless sideshow. What does matter, vitally, deeply, urgently, is the imperial bloodbath itself, and the fact that it will go on, and on, no matter what Barack Obama does or doesn't do about Stanley McChrystal.

I don't give a glimmer of a shadow of the faintest damn about the outcome of incidents of this kind, because the major participants are all war criminals. I have been planning for some time an explanation of an especially unforgivable aspect of the entirely phony moral posturing engaged in by virtually all those who take part in our national discussion. The particular aspect to which I refer is this: almost no one takes the concepts of war crimes and war criminals seriously at all.