General Discharge

Posted on Jun 22, 2010

By Robert Scheer

After the brilliant Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings, President Barack Obama has no valid option other than to fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Not because of the dozen outrageous anti-administration verbal gaffes which have been reported, but rather because this definitive piece on the “Runaway General” establishes the man in charge of the Afghanistan misadventure as an egotistical flake whose half-baked Afghan war-fighting strategy should never have been endorsed in the first place. It is McChrystal’s policy of counterinsurgency (COIN) that must be fired more than the man who exemplifies its irrationality.

It was the 66-page McChrystal Report that provided Obama with the justification for escalating rather than ending the decade-long Afghanistan war: winning the hearts and minds of people who have no intention of opening either to our tender mercies. They don’t like us or trust us and probably think we smell funny and our food tastes awful. Such profound cultural differences are what make the world an interesting place, but the continuing arrogance of centuries of U.S. imperial policy insists that the rest of the world wants to be just like us.