So what now?

Interesting if predictable developments today with GEN McChrystal being relieved

by President Obama.  Er, I'm sorry, resigning.  And certainly an

interesting move with GEN Petraeus being promoted, er, demoted, er,

reasssigned – yeah, that's it, reassigned.  That strikes me as a wise move,

all the more so because of the explicit statement that the rest of the CENTCOM job

will not be his, too.  It's not like that's an easy enough job alone and we

need to get more mileage out of that particular 4 star billet.

I also think the fairly short press statement today was delivered fairly well

by President Obama.  I'm sorry, he just looked so whiny and bureaucratic doing

his Gulf "War" address, particularly in Jon Stewart's

commission accomplished send up, that I was very anxious about today.

But the emphasis in today's address on the assertion of civilian control over

the military struck me as very ironic in this particular time and in this particular

war.  One of the key thrusts of the

Rolling Stone article

is the issue of who is really in control of the civilian side of things — who was

GEN McChrystal's counterpart, and was there coherent execution there?

Anne Flaherty reports:

"They brought somebody in to be a hard-nosed realist," said Anthony Cordesman,

a national security analyst with close ties to the Defense Department. "You

brought somebody in to get the job done after eight years of neglect and failure.

You brought somebody in basically to fight his way through the bureaucratic

and organizational barriers."

I do not wish to naively grab the 3rd rail of Goldwater-Nichols II, and God bless

Secretary Clinton for her stability during the Afghanistan review, but are there too many

cooks spoiling that pudding?  Now that we have GEN Petraeus back in the frying

pan, the next big question, perhaps even the bigger one, is who will be our

Ambassador Crocker?

Grabbing at another nugget in all the news, another thing that strikes me here

is that GEN McChrystal reviewed the Rolling Stone article in advance and

didn't push back. 

You can make much of his limited inside-the-beltway experience, but he is too savvy,

detailed, and just plain brilliant for me to believe this is all a surprise to him

and I can only assume some sort of oddly Machiavellian machinations behind how this

played out.  And if there is a point out there, I suspect it is less about

civilian control of the military, and more about civilian control of civilians and

the broader issue of the expeditionary fitness of our executive and legislative

branches.

I am sorry Dennis Hopper did not live to see the day when Rolling Stone generated

such a catharsis in the foreign policy apparatus of the United States.  Thank

you, GEN McChrystal, for you service. Thanks in advance, GEN Petraeus, for more

to come.  Ambassador Crocker — aren't you a little bored in that

Aggie job?

——————————-

Updated:

No edits were made above, but please disregard the bit about a Machiavellian

moment.  That hinged upon my perception of a "damn the torpedoes" moment from

Politico's now-discredited reporting of GEN McChrystal's pre-publication blessing

of the RS article.  I re-canted in

comments

below as that came to light to be fabricated and untrue.  Be sure to read

this article to see just what was checked, and how little one could interpret

from that.  Also more reaction

here, and lots of places.