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Comment by puckettd: Saturday, August 21

Thank you for remembering my grandmother and father. Donna Puckett, Jonesville NC...read more...

Obituary: Lorna Jo McBee, 14

Comment by AvidReader: Thursday, August 19

With loving prayers for the Mc Bee family. Your friends and family care deeply....read more...

Lincoln, Garrard eye regional detention center

Comment by AvidReader: Thursday, August 19

This issue is really confusing for me...some of the candidates at the last forum supported the idea....read more...

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Top ranking government officials are rarely fired; they “regretfully” tender their resignations, sigh about their “great honor serving the American people” and then stump off to the anonymity of well-compensated consulting or board-of-director positions to shill their influence while waiting the decent interval required before publishing their insider book. It would be nice, just every once in a while, for some deserving jackass like General Stanley McChrystal to be publicly and spectacularly binned for their idiotic behavior.

And it was behavior that got McChrystal fired. Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings had unprecedented access to McChrystal and his staff for almost a month: traveling, eating and living with them and recording a plethora of juvenile and petty insults to the president, vice-president and almost every other member of the national security team. Hastings summed up the McChrystal cliques’ contempt of the civilian-military leadership over them in the subhead to his article saying, “Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.”

It’s tough to know where to begin dissecting the incredible lack of judgment by the 34-year Army veteran, but at its root is McChrystal’s career long association with Special Forces. Special Forces operators do not live in the same world as the typical soldier; because of the nature of their very deadly and secretive business lack of supervision, lack of oversight and lack of accountability are common, and its probable that somewhere along the road from airborne platoon leader to Commander, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), McChrystal never figured out that he just wasn’t as special as he’d always been told.

McChrystal’s contempt for, well, just about everyone but himself, first became evident at JSOC. In 2004 McChrystal signed off on a gun-decked investigation into the death of former Saint Louis Cardinal football player Pat Tillman who left the pros to serve in the US Army. JSOC knew almost immediately after Tillman’s death in Afghanistan that he was a victim of an intramural firefight and that some of his team members had tried to hide the fact that he had been killed by friendly fire. Officers at JSOC massaged the report to make it look as if Tillman had been killed by the Taliban and posthumously awarded him a Silver Star medal. McChrystal signed off on the award citation but warned politicians through a backchannel message not to quote the citation in speeches because they might later be embarrassed. Apparently, McChrystal himself is immune to embarrassment at this kind of duplicity, but its touching he is concerned for others.

Despite being exposed in the investigations that began when the truth came out in Tillman’s death, McChrystal was elevated to Commander of the International Security Assistance Force and Commander of U.S. Forces Afghanistan. Shortly after taking command, McChrystal tried an amateurish play at forcing President Obama into giving him more troops for Afghanistan by giving the press a lengthy report he prepared for the Secretary of Defense describing what he felt he needed to win. This unprecedented manipulation started the first round of calls for McChrystal to be fired but only earned him a trip to the woodshed with the president.

McChrystal should have learned his lesson at that point, but despite getting an additional 30,000 troops and near unconditional support, he chose to vent his dissatisfaction to the press. Worse, he allowed and encouraged his staff flunkies to engage in the same sophomoric, disrespectful manner.

The worst part of McChrystal’s idiotic behavior is the fact that he forced the president into removing one of the few general officers with the vision to fight a counterinsurgency (COIN) war. McChrystal didn’t invent COIN, he’s just executing the brilliant 1940 vintage Small Wars Manual, but an operator like McChrystal understands what it takes to win the fight in Afghanistan. Sadly, McChrystal’s maturity and diplomacy doesn’t match his operational acumen.

McChrystal got off easy being allowed to resign. President Obama should have set up a meeting between McChrystal and National Security Advisor Jim Jones, whom McChrystal referred to as “a clown.” In addition to losing his job, McChrystal could have gotten a beat down by the six-foot-four former Marine Commandant who surely would have pounded him to a size more fitting his morale stature.

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