One More Step Toward Dismantling The Empire
Digg 
Stumble Upon 
Newsvine 
Slashdot 
Mixx 
Diigo 
Delicious 
Reddit 
Facebook
Steve Walt has an indispensable post on his blog about General McChrystal, who the neocons are desperate to make into their new posterboy, making noises about rapproachment with Iran. In addition to being good news and an enjoyable serving of crow to watch the neocons eat in itself, it goes far in confirming what’s really going on in the military “push” to esacalate in Afghanistan.
A friend and mentor whose wisdom in these matters is beyond reproach tells me he sees the McChrystal request for more troops in Afghanistan as analogous to the Pentagon assessment that was commissioned in the Panama Canal debates in the 70s, which said that 100,000 troops would be necessary to secure the Canal in a military conflict with Panama, when such a number was absurdly inflated. As then, the request for more troops is the military’s way of saying don’t you dare ask us to do this.
Coming out on Iran like this therefore appears to be McChrystal’s way of saying “No, I will not succumb to neocon flattery like Petraeus, I support ending the American Raj and the opening with Iran necessary to do so.”
Filed under: Uncategorized
“No, I will not succumb to neocon flattery like Petraeus, I support ending the American Raj and the opening with Iran necessary to do so.”
I think you’re assuming too much here. Are we really to assume that his Af-Pak assessment was just a round about way of highballing the matter so that the Obama takes the opposite tack? Wouldn’t a more direct and effective way to accomplish the “ending of the American Raj” have been a report to the president that flat out concluded that there are no achievable goals in Afghanistan, we will end up staying there for decades and accomplish nothing, and, BTW, bombing Iran will make a 99.99% impossible task 100% impossible. It would seem that that sort of an assessment from Obama’s hand picked general would have carried much more weight.
Don’t get me wrong, I welcomed McChrystal’s candor on how monumentally stupid it would be to bomb Iran, but the idea of this being some rope a dope doesn’t scan.
[...] McChrystal had some positive things to say about the administration’s effort toward “rapproachment with Iran” and the helpful role Iran could play in helping stabilize Afghanistan. In addition to being [...]