McChrystal’s Conundrum

by Justin Raimondo, September 23, 2009

".......
That’s the gist of a memo [.pdf] sent to the White House by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, which was leaked to Bob Woodward and published – with "unclassified " stamped all over it – in redacted form (redacted, according to Woodward, "at the request of the government"). The fact that it was leaked is receiving far more attention than the actual content, as everyone tries to decipher who leaked it and why. The conventional explanation is the simplest: it was leaked by someone who supports McChrystal’s position – more troops, more resources, more casualties – in order to back the president into a corner. Then there are those who speculate this was a "reverse leak," i.e., someone was trying to get the president mad at the general for presumably having something to do with the leak. Not to forget the "fake leak" theory, whose adherents accuse the administration itself of being the source of the leak: the assumption being they’re trying to back themselves into a corner and cut short any congressional debate......

McChrystal is clearly itching to strike targets in Pakistan with more than just a few drones every now and then – and before you know it, we’ll be launching yet another invasion and occupation, while the good general exhorts his troops to decrease their "distance" from the Pakistanis and tells us we ought to build more schools and hospitals. Yes, well, they’ll need more hospitals, no doubt about that.

McChrystal’s conundrum is that invaders cannot be turned into faux-insurgents, "living with the people" and "protecting" them from those awful mujahedin. This can only happen in the fantasy world constructed by military theoreticians and deluded politicians, whose hubris blinds them to simple truths. "