There are bigger problems with McChrystal than bad mouthing the administration

And what does Diana West have to say about l’affaire McChrystal?

There are many, many reasons to fire Gen. McChrystal, as I first began noting back in September 2009, and they all begin with the criminally irresponsible rules of engagement (ROEs) that are predicated on a politically correct, see-no-Islam, hothouse-academic, socially-engineering vision of the world as it isn’t that has cost all too many of our men’s lives, limbs, and well-being, not to mention countless billions of dollars, and lost power and prestige that once safeguarded us against our enemies.

Firing McChrystal without also “firing” the disastrous counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy as codified by the equally culpable Gen. Petraeus does nothing to help the country out of this unrelieved nightmare of pointlessly wasteful, harmful-to-our-interests, seemingly endless war. In other words, it just doesn’t matter if McChrystal’s fired for “insubordination,” or not. So long as COIN rules, someone just as bad will step in to fill his place.

From the Rolling Stone article about the general, Byron York provides further examples of the costs of McChrystal’s COIN strategy:

The night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt. Arroyo’s platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram’s death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal’s new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied. “These were abandoned houses,” fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks. “Nobody was coming back to live in them.”

One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force,” the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that’s like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won’t have to make arrests. “Does that make any f—king sense?” Pfc. Jared Pautsch. “We should just drop a f—king bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 22, 2010 03:16 PM | Send