top u..s commander in hot water

[hoovesupsideyourhead]

Originally Posted by Riot

Why you would insert this about the Gulf into a thread about Afghanistan is a bit puzzling, but hey, we all know how classy you are

BTW, turns out the petro-geek blog Mother Jones (not Rolling Stone) was copying and sending around to try and verify about the well casing being compromised is ... looking pretty accurate this morning.

I hope your own personal indicators of the extent of damage caused by the oil spill - your swimming pool and gas grill - are okay.

in our area they oil has not hit the beaches as hard as others..i know that because i live here.. and didnt read it on some link..now how about obamas total mis handling of the event..

[Antitrust32]

Originally Posted by dellinger63

Maybe the damage done to the United States by Obama the man is greater than the office of President?
]

[hoovesupsideyourhead]

he'd retire with class.

hes got more class and sevice to this country in his pinky finger than the
prez will ever have..

you dont become a 4 star general unless you put your time in like 35 years or so and be elected by congress

not like the current prez who slinked in on the race card..has like 6 years of exp total..and is sooooooooo classy..oh
holla here comes the prez....fn joke
award no 3

[Danzig]

Originally Posted by Antitrust32

someone needs to clean out their inbox...

[Antitrust32]

Originally Posted by Danzig

someone needs to clean out their inbox...

it should have space!!

[Danzig]

Originally Posted by Antitrust32

it should have space!!

lol

that's what she said...

[Antitrust32]

Originally Posted by Danzig

lol

that's what she said...

[Riot]

McChrystal just resigned.

[dellinger63]

Originally Posted by Riot

McChrystal just resigned.

Now that's class!

Maybe Obama could learn a thing or 2 from this guy.

[Rupert Pupkin]

Originally Posted by dellinger63

Love some of the quotes

McChrystal described his first meeting with Obama as disappointing and said that Obama was unprepared for the meeting.


National Security Advisor Jim Jones is described by a McChrystal aide as a “clown” stuck in 1985.


Others aides joked about Biden’s last name as sounding like “Bite me” since Biden opposed the surge.

After Obama gives him his a$$kicking, reading a prepared statement, he's gone.

As you said, it said that Obama was totally unprepared for the meeting. In addition, it said that McChrystal said that Obama didn't even know who he was. This upset McChrystal. He is a big General so he is obviously used to people knowing who he is. He was very disappointed when Obama appeared to have no idea who he was and appeared to know nothing about him.

[Rupert Pupkin]

Originally Posted by dellinger63

Now that's class!

Maybe Obama could learn a thing or 2 from this guy.

I doubt it was his choice to resign. In most cases like this, they tell you that you are going to be fired if you don't resign, so you might as well just resign. It sort of let's everyone save face.

[geeker2]

Originally Posted by Rupert Pupkin

I doubt it was his choice to resign. In most cases like this, they tell you that you are going to be fired if you don't resign, so you might as well just resign. It sort of let's everyone save face.

It's not confirmed.......Joe Klein is wrong 85% of the time.

[Riot]

The actual RS article is available on-line for those that want the original and not the political blog version:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

Klein now says resignation, "Offered, not yet accepted".

[dellinger63]

Just maybe the General resigned because in his 35 years experience he has learned it's best to destroy an enemy in war not pay them off for safe transit. Not to mention having a boss who is only able to get bad a$$ by reading a prepared statement and who probably never discharged a firearm in his life. A man who cries U.N. anytime he's forced into a corner. But we all know what the U.N. is capable of. Talk about bad a$$!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062104628.html

[Rupert Pupkin]

This is from the Rolling Stone Article:

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his ****ing war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

Rupert: This does not make Obama look very good.

Riot: I disagree

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

[Danzig]

point is, whether he agreed with obama and his policies or not, he's military, and he knows how things are supposed to be. obama, for good or bad, is the commander in chief...and believe me, i know a lot of soldiers and sailors aren't happy about it. but, you don't do interviews and bash your commander, and not expect there to be any fallout.

[Riot]

Rupert: I just make crap up about other posters I don't like

FTFY

[Danzig]

Originally Posted by Rupert Pupkin

This is from the Rolling Stone Article:

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his ****ing war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

Rupert: This does not make Obama look very good.

Riot: I disagree

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

considering how things went when the troop increase was suggested, by the man in charge of waging the war, and rejected...i'm not surprised at these comments. obama is out of his league, and this is just one more instance that proves it. he had no earthly idea how to proceed, and chose to completely ignore the suggestions and advice from his head man on the ground back right after taking office. this reminds me of how the germans waged war under hitler. now, before anyone gets their panties in a wad, i'm in no way likening obama to hitler...however, the fact that hitler felt the need to have a real hand in the waging of that war directly contributed to the germans losing that war (thank goodness for that).
now, just think if every time pershing in ww1, or eisenhower in ww2, had to go and beg for extra men from their cic's? hell, we'd still be in the trenches on the western front. but no, the presidents recognized that men who had trained since high school for military service, and had been taught planning and logistics, were those best to make these decisions-and they stayed the hell out of the way.

[Riot]

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

I think for a new President taking the advice of the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon isn't a bad thing.

The rest of the article around the one paragraph:

From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.

As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the ****ers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of "mission failure." The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass.

Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. "I found that time painful," McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. "I was selling an unsellable position." For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics – a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks. "The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people," says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.

In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words "victory" or "win," Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to ThAfghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.

[dellinger63]

Originally Posted by Danzig

point is, whether he agreed with obama and his policies or not, he's military, and he knows how things are supposed to be. obama, for good or bad, is the commander in chief...and believe me, i know a lot of soldiers and sailors aren't happy about it. but, you don't do interviews and bash your commander, and not expect there to be any fallout.

He knew there would be fallout. He probably thought this was the best choice with the most effect. It's hard to expect him to fight for a boss he feels doesn't have his back and prefers 10 min photo ops rather than discussion especially when it deals with the needs of deployed troops under his command and responsibility. Obama is all show and the General is all go. The two were never going to see eye to eye.