Furious Obama summons Gen. McCrystal to explain comments - (How about they're true!)

Furious President Obama summons Gen. Stanley McCrystal to explain comments - Gordon Lubold - POLITICO.com

It contains a number of jabs by McChrystal and his staff aimed not only at the President but at Vice President Biden, special envoy Richard Holbrooke, Karl Eikenberry, the ambassador to Afghanistan, and others.

I've met Richard Holbrooke. I found him duplicitous and only interested in his own political advancement. Truth was alien to him.

The unfortunate thing is that Gen. McChrystal opened his big mouth around a doofus 'journalist' from Rolling Stone Magazine. Rolling Stone has not supported much about the American Military, even when P. J. O'Rourke wrote a column there. Gen. McChrystal should have known better, even if he didn't know any better (as reported) than to have voted for Obama. He should have resigned if he needed to go public or gone to his superiors, as all complaints flow uphill in the Army (see Military Dissent Should Be Private by Victor Davis Hanson).

Gen. Billy Mitchell was a rare exception, but he forced his own Court Martial. That was due to rapid changes in airplane technology that was totally ignored by the Chiefs of Staff after WWI.

McChrystal’s real offense

By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
06/22/10 8:40 AM EDT

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta/file)

There is a lot of uproar about Gen. Stanley’s McChrystal’s disrespectful comments about his civilian bosses in the Obama administration, and President Obama would be entirely justified in firing McChrystal for statements McChrystal and his subordinates made to Rolling Stone. Obama is a deeply flawed commander-in-chief who doesn’t want to be fighting a war on terror, but he is the commander-in-chief. He should have a general who will carry out his policies without public complaint until the voters can decide to change those policies.
But the bigger problem with McChrystal’s leadership has always been the general’s devotion to unreasonably restrictive rules of engagement that are resulting in the unnecessary deaths of American and coalition forces. We have had many, many accounts of the rules endangering Americans, and the Rolling Stone article provides more evidence. In the story, a soldier at Combat Outpost JFM who had earlier met with McChrystal was killed in a house that American officers had asked permission to destroy. From the article:

The night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt. Arroyo’s platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram’s death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal’s new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied. “These were abandoned houses,” fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks. “Nobody was coming back to live in them.”
One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force,” the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that’s like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won’t have to make arrests. “Does that make any f–king sense?” Pfc. Jared Pautsch. “We should just drop a f–king bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?”