Obama pissed by McChrystal going rogue? Has McChrystal gone rogue? He's certainly ruffled some feathers with the leaking of his recommendations to the president a couple weeks ago and now making very public comments on what needs to be done in Afghanistan if you wanna win. Rumour is that when Obama saw fit to make time for him while in full rut with Olympic committee it was to dress him down. Possibly. His actions only seem to make sense if he believes Obama is going to reverse course and go against his recommendations and he wants to either try and forestall that or simply make sure it's a matter of public record so that if things go badly he can't be made the fall guy.
I take McChrystal's actions and possibly more significantly Petraeus' silence regarding those actions to be an indication that the military has come to share my opinion that Obama is a charlatan and was playing politics when he embraced the war in his campaign and then again when he set in motion, soon after taking office, facts on the ground which led McChrystal et al to believe that embrace to be serious only to find now Obama waking up the next morning, looking over at what he crawled into bed with and saying 'Jesus, that was a mistake'.
Now, I've criticized COIN as McChrystal and Petraeus have expressed it and possibly the criticism has been unfair or misguided or not grounded in reality - I dunno - but whatever the truth is the real question now becomes has Obama made the Afghan situation untenable by employing aggressive rhetoric that he either didn't mean or didn't understand the consequences of? Certainly, if Obama has already decided to not follow through on McChrystal's recommendations and these deliberations are merely more political game playing to give the impression they truly laboured and agonized over these weighty decisions - well, you can see how that could cause some serious tension between the military and its civilian overseers.
