(no subject)
Frank Rich has a beautifully researched column on McChrystal, Petraeus, Obama, and DC media dysfunction. I think Rich is overly harsh to McChrystal, and that the comments about McChrystal being incompetent and mocking the French aren't well supported, but Rich is very incisive about the war in Afghanistan and the media's continuing support for it, or at least their continuing acquiescence to government and military claims that continuing the war is necessary and worth the money spent and the soldiers killed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27rich.html?src=me&ref=general
Before he became Director of the Joint Staff in 2008, McChrystal worked with the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC, Ranger-type commando stuff. He led Task Force 6-26, which in 2006 found Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, called in the airstrike that killed him, and took McChrystal to the bombed-out hut to identify the body personally. 6-26 also did interrogations, and 34 of its members were disciplined after the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal broke in 2004. Bob Woodward wrote a little bit about the very secretive JSOC program, quoting senior officials as saying that the work done jointly by JSOC and CIA paramilitary units was the most significant contributor to the 2007 surge. It reminds me a bit of the Vietnam era Phoenix Program: somewhat less supervised and more evil than the usual killing people and breaking things that the military does, but not as evil as other things the CIA does. (I'm thinking the gold standard of US military-industrial complex evil would be starting a successful civil war in a peaceful country you don't like and replacing a fairly democratic and humane government with a dictator who murdered and tortured his own citizens routinely, but otherwise always did what the US asked.) Like the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the JSOC/CIA ops in Iraq seem to be the most effective tactic the US has there against guerrillas who spend most of their time undercover and posing as civilians. And like the Phoenix Program, although very effective, it's not sufficient to compensate for the lack of an overall strategy that would turn the place into a peaceful democratic ally like Japan and Germany after WWII.
Petraeus and McChrystal are both Rangers and Master Parachutists, are both leading advocates of counterinsurgency doctrine or COIN, and were both heavily involved in the 2007 Iraq surge. The media refrain that McChrystal is a wild rebel and Petraeus is a teacher's pet is probably a huge exaggeration of their differences. Petraeus also happens to have health problems, possibly pretty bad ones, and may have his eye on the presidency, although that may just be a Beltway rumor with no basis. Other than that, the reason I don't know much about Petraeus is simply that there doesn't seem to be much interesting information about him published-- similar though they may be, Petraeus hasn't gotten his hands as dirty with stuff like torture as McChrystal has.
Searching for Obama's Afghanistan withdrawal deadline turns up a lot of noise produced in the last week, and a little bit of noise from December about how Obama's staff was explaining that "withdrawal" may not mean as much as one might expect. I wasn't even aware Obama had set an Afghanistan withdrawal deadline until this week, so if I read anything about this July 2011 deadline before this week, I must have dismissed it immediately as a tenuous plan, filled with loopholes, and without much significance. However, Obama's staffers sure are talking it up now, so maybe they mean it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27rich.html?src=me&ref=general
Before he became Director of the Joint Staff in 2008, McChrystal worked with the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC, Ranger-type commando stuff. He led Task Force 6-26, which in 2006 found Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, called in the airstrike that killed him, and took McChrystal to the bombed-out hut to identify the body personally. 6-26 also did interrogations, and 34 of its members were disciplined after the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal broke in 2004. Bob Woodward wrote a little bit about the very secretive JSOC program, quoting senior officials as saying that the work done jointly by JSOC and CIA paramilitary units was the most significant contributor to the 2007 surge. It reminds me a bit of the Vietnam era Phoenix Program: somewhat less supervised and more evil than the usual killing people and breaking things that the military does, but not as evil as other things the CIA does. (I'm thinking the gold standard of US military-industrial complex evil would be starting a successful civil war in a peaceful country you don't like and replacing a fairly democratic and humane government with a dictator who murdered and tortured his own citizens routinely, but otherwise always did what the US asked.) Like the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the JSOC/CIA ops in Iraq seem to be the most effective tactic the US has there against guerrillas who spend most of their time undercover and posing as civilians. And like the Phoenix Program, although very effective, it's not sufficient to compensate for the lack of an overall strategy that would turn the place into a peaceful democratic ally like Japan and Germany after WWII.
Petraeus and McChrystal are both Rangers and Master Parachutists, are both leading advocates of counterinsurgency doctrine or COIN, and were both heavily involved in the 2007 Iraq surge. The media refrain that McChrystal is a wild rebel and Petraeus is a teacher's pet is probably a huge exaggeration of their differences. Petraeus also happens to have health problems, possibly pretty bad ones, and may have his eye on the presidency, although that may just be a Beltway rumor with no basis. Other than that, the reason I don't know much about Petraeus is simply that there doesn't seem to be much interesting information about him published-- similar though they may be, Petraeus hasn't gotten his hands as dirty with stuff like torture as McChrystal has.
Searching for Obama's Afghanistan withdrawal deadline turns up a lot of noise produced in the last week, and a little bit of noise from December about how Obama's staff was explaining that "withdrawal" may not mean as much as one might expect. I wasn't even aware Obama had set an Afghanistan withdrawal deadline until this week, so if I read anything about this July 2011 deadline before this week, I must have dismissed it immediately as a tenuous plan, filled with loopholes, and without much significance. However, Obama's staffers sure are talking it up now, so maybe they mean it.