There are opinions floating everywhere on cable news, editorial pages and talk radio about whether or not President Obama should can General Stanley McChrystal for comments that he and his aides made in the now infamous Rolling Stone article that is now available online.
Obama is scheduled to meet with the embarrassed leader of the Afghan war at 11:30 a.m. today.
Although he can be infuriating, there are times like today when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman can perfectly synthesize the real issues into one particular column. His his piece today, entitled What's Second Prize?, the Times foreign policy columnist hits it in his first few sentences:
Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s trashing of his civilian colleagues was unprofessional and may cost him his job. If so, it will be a sad end to a fine career. But no general is indispensable. What is indispensable is that when taking America surging deeper into war in Afghanistan, President Obama has to be able to answer the most simple questions at a gut level: Do our interests merit such an escalation and do I have the allies to achieve victory? President Obama never had good answers for these questions, but he went ahead anyway. The ugly truth is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it — or had the courage to pull the plug. That is not a sufficient reason to take the country deeper into war in the most inhospitable terrain in the world. You know you’re in trouble when you’re in a war in which the only party whose objectives are clear, whose rhetoric is consistent and whose will to fight never seems to diminish is your enemy: the Taliban.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2010.