In today's political culture, there's no question about the superiority of liberal governance over conservative governance. That's because today's conservatives aren't conservatives, but liberals have managed to maintain at least some integrity along with some distance from cheap power.
Not a great distance, some. Not all liberals, some.
The cesspit of both parties is modern-day Washington. Frank Rich, an old-fashioned liberal and journalist, cheers the young, previously unknown journalist who shone the light on a Washington mess neither party can take pride in. Matt Hastings -- familiar with that name yet? -- managed to learn more about Washington in a short time than many (are willing to) learn in a lifetime.
In response to Hastings' revelations Obama did the right thing. But it took him long enough.
The moment he pulled the trigger, there was near-universal agreement that President Obama had done the inevitable thing, the right thing and, best of all, the bold thing. But before we get carried away with relief and elation, let’s not forget what we saw in the tense 36 hours that fell between late Monday night, when word spread of Rolling Stone’s blockbuster article, and high noon Wednesday, when Obama MacArthured his general. That frenzied interlude revealed much about the state of Washington, the Afghanistan war and the Obama presidency — little of it cheering and none of it resolved by the ingenious replacement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus, the only militarily and politically bullet-proof alternative.
What we saw was this: 1) Much of the Beltway establishment was blindsided by Michael Hastings’s scoop, an impressive feat of journalism by a Washington outsider who seemed to know more about what was going on in Washington than most insiders did; 2) Obama’s failure to fire McChrystal months ago for both his arrogance and incompetence was a grievous mistake that illuminates a wider management shortfall at the White House; 3) The present strategy has produced no progress in this nearly nine-year-old war, even as the monthly coalition body count has just reached a new high.
In other words, a young Rolling Stone writer may see Washington with clearer eyes than many, but we can forget about "change." Either Obama learns from this -- and acts on it -- or he doesn't. I think it's likely he won't. Perhaps most telling, journalists won't either.
Symbolically enough, Hastings was reporting his McChrystal story abroad just as Beltway media heavies and their most bold-faced subjects were dressing up for the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. Rolling Stone has never bought a table or thrown an afterparty for that bacchanal, and it has not even had a Washington bureau since the mid-1970s.
Something we should notice and remember: the earliest contemporary "tea parties" (before Capitalization, in more ways than one) were more like Hastings and nothing like the Washington-feted right wing nuts they have become. Washington devours its young.
Another "outsider," Rachel Maddow is cited by Rich as having nailed the McChrystal failures. No, McChrystal wasn't a hero, in spite of the aging pundits who cheered him on. McChrystal, like so many of his DC supporters, was a small-minded, serial screw-up with an always-on microphone.
The McChrystal cadre’s utter distaste for its civilian colleagues on the war team was an ipso facto death sentence for the general’s signature counterinsurgency strategy. You can’t engage in nation building without civilian partnership. As Rachel Maddow said last week of McChrystal, “the guy who was promoting and leading the counterinsurgency strategy has shown by his actions that even he doesn’t believe in it.”
This fundamental contradiction helps explain some of the war’s failures under McChrystal’s aborted command, including the inability to hold Marja (pop. 60,000), which he had vowed to secure in pure counterinsurgency fashion by rolling out a civilian “government in a box” after troops cleared it of the Taliban. Such is the general’s contempt for leadership outside his orbit that it extends even to our allies. The Hastings article opens with McChrystal mocking the French at a time when every ally’s every troop is a precious, dwindling commodity in Afghanistan.
McChrystal always had more medals and supporters than he deserved.
God, I hope we don't wind up saying the same about Barack Obama. Rich concludes with a jab at Rahm Emanuel. Perhaps a wised-up Obama will clean House and bring in people to whom no one could possibly apply the term "experienced Beltway insiders."
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Replacing McChrystal with David Petraeus is no solution to the larger problem.
Andrew Bacevich, a former military officer who is known for his clarity of vision about America's wars and warriors, conservative and Obama supporter, has been writing about his fear that America is becoming a nation of endless war, a war not on our soil, a war from which the average American is detached, and a war which sustains an arrogant military culture, "the Long War." He writes in today's Washington Post:
The Long War is not America's war. It belongs exclusively to "the troops," lashed to a treadmill that finds soldiers and Marines either serving in a combat zone or preparing to deploy.
To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end. Once begun, wars continue, persisting regardless of whether they receive public support. President Obama's insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, this nation is not even remotely "at" war. In explaining his decision to change commanders without changing course in Afghanistan, the president offered this rhetorical flourish: "Americans don't flinch in the face of difficult truths." In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths. Largely unaffected by events in Afghanistan and Iraq and preoccupied with problems much closer to home, they have demonstrated a fine ability to tune out war. Soldiers (and their families) are left holding the bag.
Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend. The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants -- along with the conviction that "Team America," as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption -- suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction.
To imagine that replacing McChrystal with Gen. David H. Petraeus will fix the problem is wishful thinking. To put it mildly, Petraeus is no simple soldier. He is a highly skilled political operator, whose name appears on Republican wish lists as a potential presidential candidate in 2012. Far more significant, the views cultivated within Team America are shared elsewhere.
The day the McChrystal story broke, an active-duty soldier who has served multiple combat tours offered me his perspective on the unfolding spectacle. The dismissive attitude expressed by Team America, he wrote, "has really become a pandemic in the Army." Among his peers, a belief that "it is OK to condescend to civilian leaders" has become common, ranking officers permitting or even endorsing "a culture of contempt" for those not in uniform. Once the previously forbidden becomes acceptable, it soon becomes the norm.
