Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, June 23, 2010 10:42:05 PM
Obama took less than twelve hours to make me to eat this crow. One leg of my triangular reasoning (Petraeus won't do it) was filled with smoke. Why? Because, as it turns out, General Petraeus is a damned saint.
He was the only man who could take the Afghan offensive over in mid stream like this. He demoted himself from CENTCOM to do it, too. Now they will have to find somebody else to take over there, although the new Afghan theater boss will essentially be running with carte blanche from Command.
Not that Dave will have any more pull with Obama and Biden than anybody else did. You won't see any more troops being committed, or any extentions of the politically based withdrawal timetables already set. The crazy thing about Obama is that he sets the end dates to keep his base happy here- like with the closing of Gitmo, he will be happy to hold people there indefinitely if necessary. He just doesn't realize the damage he does with his mouth with the troops on the ground there. A commitment to withdrawal does nothing but embolden the insurgents there.
At any rate, the extra attention may serve some good. Like, for starters, what the hell are we doing there? Bush did a lousy job of explaining and re-explaining why we were in Iraq, but it wan't hard for me to figure out his rationale. I could present it to you in five or ten minutes. You may disagree with the premises, but I had premises to work with. Obama campaigned on Iraq being a "bad war" and Afghanistan being the "good war we should have been fighting all along".
How does that work? Iraq had one government ruling a secular near-middle class (for the region), and now has another single government. Karzai rules Kabul, and lets the warlords in the nether regions manufacture their opium and trade with the Pakistanis at will. It is a chaotic zoo. The only advantage we have over the Soviet occupation twenty years ago is that the locals all know we are not trying to occupy them.
The bottom line, though, is that McChrystal was irresponsible and I would have pulled him, too. The good news is, we have the best counter insurgency guy in the world in command there now, even if he is being supported here by a clown from Delaware and an ambulance chasing ignoramus from Chicago. I still hope we can kick butt there, even if it is like playing in the Masters with a ten handicap.