Obama Misses the Afghan Exit Ramp
by Ray McGovern, Consortium News, June 25, 2010
Raymond McGovern (born 1939) is a retired CIA officer turned political activist (see biography).
Is President Barack Obama so dense that he could not see why Gen. Stanley McChrystal might actually have wanted to be fired — and rescued from the current March of Folly in Afghanistan, a mess much of his own making?
McChrystal leaves behind a long trail of broken promises and unfulfilled expectations. For example, there is no real security, at least during the night, in Marja, which McChrystal devoted enormous resources to conquer this spring.
Remember his boast that he would then bring to Marja a “government-in-box” and offer an object lesson regarding what was in store for those pesky Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city?
But it’s now clear that there will be no offensive against Kandahar anytime soon. On its merits, that is surely a good thing, but it is a huge embarrassment for McChrystal and his former boss, the never nonplussed Gen. David Petraeus.
When McChrystal and his undisciplined senior aides let a Rolling Stone reporter know what they really thought of the “intimidated” Obama and most of his national security team, Obama and his advisers rose to the bait.
Phi Beta Iota: Ray McGovern is a man of intelligence and integrity. He gives General McChrystal too much credit here for a contrived exit, while at the same time touching on the pathethic lack of integrity in the White House, happy to sacrifice lives of “the little people” if it can embroil General Patraeus, who never had a shot at the Presidency, in a one-man quagmire. What Obama has just done is treason in the purest sense of the word: there has been no strategic analysis, no Whole of Government conceptualization of what we need to do to rescue America while disengaging from a lecacy of 50 years of colonialism, militarism, and predatory immoral capitalism. Obama is treating the US military–and especially General Patraeus who should have known better than to accept– as a pawn on the political chess-board–at the same time that he is, with malice aforethought, doing nothing at all in the public interest, just counting the days to his Goldman Sachs retirement package. Shame. Shame. Shame.
Article recommended by Chuck Spinney.
