McChrystal: Gone and Soon Forgotten

Naming Petraeus in his place is a stroke of personnel genius.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, June 23, 2010, at 4:36 PM ET

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President Barack Obama has accomplished what many might have thought impossible just a few hours earlier. He has fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, his combat commander in Afghanistan, in such a way that not only will the general go unmissed but his name will likely soon be forgotten.

Obama's decision to replace McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus is a stroke of brilliance, an unassailable move, politically and strategically.

On a political level, McChrystal has many fans inside Congress and the military, but Petraeus has orders of magnitude more. No one could accuse Obama of compromising the war effort, knowing that Petraeus is stepping in.

On a strategic level, while McChrystal designed the U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, Petraeus is its ur-architect. Petraeus literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency strategy while McChrystal was still running the black-bag hunter-killers of the special-ops command.