Jim Sleeper: McChrystal's Master-Stroke?
[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale University.]
An interesting theory about Stanley McChrystal's motives and strategy -- and about what Obama may have lost by dismissing him -- popped up in the thread below my post yesterday, and I urged David Seaton to make the comment into a post of his own. He's done it, and I'd like to know what others think.
Seaton suggests that McChrystal -- furious at Obama's time-lines and under-commitment of troops and resources to what the general believes should be a massive counterinsurgency, embedded in a total war -- wanted to be fired, so that blame for the inevitable defeat of the present effort would be placed on Obama and his civilian team's refusal to commit fully to win the war.
McChrystal can now retire from the military and undertake a massive domestic insurgency of his own, with total commitment from Murdoch and the conservative message machine. Neo-cons will be back in the saddle of public discourse, riding hard. As Seaton notes, the "I want my country back" crowd will march in lockstep behind McChrystal, denouncing Obama's indecision, not the impossibility of McChrystal's grand strategy itself.
Hence a Machiavellian question: Shouldn't Obama have refused McChrystal's resignation; made him eat humble pie in public by proclaiming the wisdom of civilian control; and sent him back to Afghanistan? By firing McChrystal, hasn't Obama instead unleashed his own punishment for going into Afghanistan as LBJ did into Vietnam -- less out of conviction than out of a desire to cover his right flank at home? Isn't this another Greek tragedy, with McChrystal Obama's Nemesis?
You can see the tragedy unfolding when you note how, soon after the Rolling Stone story broke, some neo-cons' initial "surge" on behalf of McChrystal collapsed into a very different, more sinister strategy by day's end.
Neo-cons hoped at first to save the architect of their grand strategy in Afghanistan, which I mocked months ago in Dissent. But the only story they really want to push now is Obama's failure to commit us to the total war and total victory that they crave in all times and all places, because History Tells Them that every time is 1938 or 1940, and everywhere (Moscow, Baghdad, Tehran, the Pashtun) is Hitler's Berlin, and every liberal Democrat is a Neville Chamberlain, fatuously proclaiming "Peace in our Time," as Obama supposedly did last year when he went to Cairo, Istanbul, and Moscow -- and even Berlin. (Why didn't he just go to Munich? That's what neo-cons want to know.)
Neo-cons recite -- in their sleep, in the shower, and online -- Winston Churchill's response in 1940 to a message from FDR bearing a Longfellow poem reading, "Sail on, Oh ship of state/ Sail on, Oh Union strong and great...." Churchill read the poem on the air to Britons hanging on his every word. Then he said:
"What shall be my answer to this great man, in your name? 'Give us the tools, and we will finish the job!'"
And what did Commentary's Peter Wehner write yesterday while trying to make the best of Obama's replacement of McChrystal with David Petraeus? "Barack Obama better be all in," Wehner warned, meaning that the president had better scrap the time-lines and ramp up the war. "If given the tools, David Petraeus -- one more time -- can finish the job."
Do you hear an echo of Churchill? But is this 1940? And are the Muslim insurgents (against what, exactly?) really the Axis? There's a big debate underway about that, but, knowing all the answers as they do, the neo-cons were solidly behind McChrystal until yesterday and, in some cases, even a day after the Rolling Stone story raised serious questions about his understanding of civilian control of the military.
The first neo-con to rush forward in McChrystal's favor after the story broke was Commentary Magazine's Jennifer Rubin, one of the many, many always-on-message neo-con drones who never think a serious political thought because they're too busy lacing the line of the moment with just the right mix of solemn patriotism and tactical slime (I bold-face both below) to put "the line" across:
"Far from being evidence of McChrystal's insubordination, the [Rolling Stone] article actually says much more about the administration's mistakes in the course of a war to which they have committed so much American blood and treasure. If there is dissension in the ranks about some of the political and diplomatic blunders of the past year and a half, it speaks more to Obama's own failure to exert leadership than to McChrystal's faults."
Obama's leadership is a legitimate concern, whether you want total war or think that we shouldn't have tried counterinsurgency at all and that Obama was dragged into it only because, like LBJ, he had to cover his right flank. Neo-cons already considered McChrystal a better national leader than Obama, so out came Rubin's unthinking, on-message reaction.
Similarly on-message was Washington Post neo-con editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt, whose page offered three reasons why McChrystal must not be fired: He had created the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, he had good working relationships there, and now, via Rolling Stone, he'd outed the Obama administration's faults, which, of course, are more grievous than his own.
Rubin, clearly delighted to sing in Hiatt's chorus, weighed in immediately with "a fourth reason" to keep McChrystal: "Obama needs to shed his peevish and self-absorbed persona,... and to dispel the growing perception that he's in over his head.... (And by the way, if McChrystal does quit, won't we hear a whole lot more from him about the civilian officials who've been making the military's job harder?) "
Who did Rubin think she was advising here, and to what end? It was getting a little embarrassing, especially when the Weekly Standard announced a Message Change, moving with its own hero John McCain's statement to the effect that McChrystal must indeed be dismissed.
The ostensible reason for the neo-con shift was its loyalty to the republic's cardinal principle of civilian control. The real reason is the neo-cons' desire to free McChrystal to heap the blame on Obama.
Rubin began to backtrack, but only in order to stay with the message: "Obama's decision to accept Gen. Stanley McChyrstal's resignation was not unexpected. By bringing back Gen. David Petraeus, he assuages the concerns from supporters of the Afghanistan mission as to whether we are committed to victory. There are two more essential changes required," she continued: Because "McChrystal threw the curtain open on the dysfunctional and counterproductive civilian team in Afghanistan," obviously "Richard Holbrooke and Karl Eikenberry should be canned.... Second, a wise reader likes to tell me, 'Generals should only talk to their troops.' What a fine idea."
Oops, not so wise and not so fine: Rubin's Commentary online colleagues began to correct this and others of her butt-covering lurches, Max Boot informing her that, these days, generals actually need proactive public media strategies, not silence.
Finally, Peter Wehner weighed in "In Praise of Obama and Petraeus," as noted. What had complicated the neo-cons' Message was that they do admire Petraeus, hero of the Iraq surge. Now they must drive a wedge between him and Obama by showing that Petraeus, too, wants more tools to finish the job than Obama is likely to provide. Wehner's "praise" of Obama for appointing Petraeus will very soon be followed by his not-so-sorrowful despair at the president's failure to follow through.
It won't be very hard to carry this line, especially once McChrystal gives his first big, out-of-uniform speech at the American Enterprise Institute. Brace yourself for calls to escalate the war that'll make McCain's "Bomb, bomb, bomb/ Bomb bomb Iran" seem like the joke he only half-meant it to be.
This is no joke. It's either 1940, and the Axis is just across the channel, or it's 1914, and the neo-con revolver journalists are teaming up with generals ,as their predecessors did then in Europe, to foment public enthusiasm for a new war.
The problem, as Seaton suggests, is that the "I want my country back" crowd -- and, I would add, more and more of our would-be public intellectuals, from Paul Berman to New York Times Book Review deputy editor Barry Gewen -- have become addled and angry enough to believe that it is 1940 and that that is how the world is, and how it must be, unless we gird up our loins and unleash the dogs of torture and war. For them, there is no other way, and now Obama has given them a new martyr and champion.