Have you read the Rolling Stones article? or Have you just heard talking heads, news stories, Obama administration response, McCrystal's apology, Brit Hume's outrage, Rush's defense, and Gibb's response that McCrystal was questionably not "capable and mature enough" to be general over Afghanistan?
Try to think for yourself, is McCrystal the victim of journalist hype? If you read the article notice magazine’s editors that call the White House “wimps”, and it is the author that uses almost every f-word in the piece, gratuitously, gratingly, and not while quoting anyone. The only f-word used by someone else is a Brit saying how much some people love McChrystal’s habit of showing up on patrol.
To make it easier to skim I made all content spoken by McCrystal or what advisor's thought and in red what article author Hasting claims in a hearsay manner without source or quote...just Hastings own personal ideas/impressions are. (Is this what journalism is?)
I know, if you are like most, you don't like to read or probably will never read the WHOLE article. I read the whole article, and so should you if you want to talk about it. So read the whole article if you really want to make up your mind about McCrystal's guilt.Rolling Stone Article
Well, here is the first page. Really try to, at least, read it...the other 5 pages have no quotes by McCrystal about Obama that I saw and really made McCrystal out to be a wild, cold, military-killing-driven man now General of Afghanistan.
Let's be clear on what IS in the Rolling Stones Article. Here is page one of a 6 page online article titled, "The Runaway General":
Hasting is best known for his memoir book he wrote after his girlfriend died in a suicide bombing on the streets of Iraq. He is not a very prolific or highly experienced professional journalist. I noted a lot in red because without a direct name quoted, it is hearsay. I have watched too much Judge Judy! I writer can put his thoughts and impression in an article if he can back it up with solid facts, not un-named advisor, someone, an aide, a person in the room.... come on now... PLEASE, just the facts, Reporter Hasting, just the facts.
So you read and make the call. What was the horrible statement made by McCrystal about the President and his administration? Help me please because I didn't find it. If you read the whole story and find the quote I missed , please put it in the comments.
And McCrystal says a lot and much is negatively recorded by the writer who is a freelance, want-a-be-famous author, Hasting said about McCrystal in the article.
I don't know McCrystal, but what I have read of him - he is a career special ops, on the ground professional, get-the-job-done soldier. He doesn't seem like a General that would throw his soliders under the bus. The quotes of his inner team seem to state that he is one of them in the war field, he can still be seen fighting side by side with infantry, and he is known as a leader that would die for his men.
He doesn't seem like a political man, a snow-job, gentler-kinder, beat-around-the-bush, kind of leader. He is a WYSIWYG type of guy. You get to know him - the good, the bad, and the ugly... because he isn't a fake... and doesn't pretends one way for one group and another way for his closest inner group.
I don't know if he is a good general, but he clearly is brave, courageous and willing to get dirty in life and death situations to serve our country in the military. I don't think he asked to be the General of this conflict. He was picked by our President. And there is no way Obama can blame this one on Bush, but wonders never cease so I am sure they are figuring out a way....
Read for yourself, think for yourself, don't believe what you are being told....
This is my total opinion - but if McCrystal really was putting his career on the chopping block, to save the lives of military men and women caught in a war strategy without a victory plan trying to win, to get our military home. Nation building never, NEVER, works... we can throw billions of dollars and thousands of American military lives, it will never gain our trust to the citizens of Afghanistan.
If our military on the ground are telling their general that they have their hands tied, they have to be too concerned about relationships and civilian protection instead of cleaning out the Taliban..... I say "Game Over"! Bring our volunteer men and women in uniform home, don't play political games with their lives.
Try to think for yourself, is McCrystal the victim of journalist hype? If you read the article notice magazine’s editors that call the White House “wimps”, and it is the author that uses almost every f-word in the piece, gratuitously, gratingly, and not while quoting anyone. The only f-word used by someone else is a Brit saying how much some people love McChrystal’s habit of showing up on patrol.
To make it easier to skim I made all content spoken by McCrystal or what advisor's thought and in red what article author Hasting claims in a hearsay manner without source or quote...just Hastings own personal ideas/impressions are. (Is this what journalism is?)
I know, if you are like most, you don't like to read or probably will never read the WHOLE article. I read the whole article, and so should you if you want to talk about it. So read the whole article if you really want to make up your mind about McCrystal's guilt.Rolling Stone Article
Well, here is the first page. Really try to, at least, read it...the other 5 pages have no quotes by McCrystal about Obama that I saw and really made McCrystal out to be a wild, cold, military-killing-driven man now General of Afghanistan.
Let's be clear on what IS in the Rolling Stones Article. Here is page one of a 6 page online article titled, "The Runaway General":
The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications.So this is what we are to be so mad about --
Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone.
Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci."
He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.
"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.
"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.
McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.
"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.
He pauses a beat.
"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."
With that, he's out the door.
"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.
"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."
The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict.
Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan."
The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile.
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.
"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"
When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001.
Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank.
According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better.
"It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."
- That someone said McCrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass.
- McCrystal's advisor said, "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."
- McCrystal said about Biden: Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile
Hasting is best known for his memoir book he wrote after his girlfriend died in a suicide bombing on the streets of Iraq. He is not a very prolific or highly experienced professional journalist. I noted a lot in red because without a direct name quoted, it is hearsay. I have watched too much Judge Judy! I writer can put his thoughts and impression in an article if he can back it up with solid facts, not un-named advisor, someone, an aide, a person in the room.... come on now... PLEASE, just the facts, Reporter Hasting, just the facts.
So you read and make the call. What was the horrible statement made by McCrystal about the President and his administration? Help me please because I didn't find it. If you read the whole story and find the quote I missed , please put it in the comments.
And McCrystal says a lot and much is negatively recorded by the writer who is a freelance, want-a-be-famous author, Hasting said about McCrystal in the article.
I don't know McCrystal, but what I have read of him - he is a career special ops, on the ground professional, get-the-job-done soldier. He doesn't seem like a General that would throw his soliders under the bus. The quotes of his inner team seem to state that he is one of them in the war field, he can still be seen fighting side by side with infantry, and he is known as a leader that would die for his men.
He doesn't seem like a political man, a snow-job, gentler-kinder, beat-around-the-bush, kind of leader. He is a WYSIWYG type of guy. You get to know him - the good, the bad, and the ugly... because he isn't a fake... and doesn't pretends one way for one group and another way for his closest inner group.
I don't know if he is a good general, but he clearly is brave, courageous and willing to get dirty in life and death situations to serve our country in the military. I don't think he asked to be the General of this conflict. He was picked by our President. And there is no way Obama can blame this one on Bush, but wonders never cease so I am sure they are figuring out a way....
Read for yourself, think for yourself, don't believe what you are being told....
This is my total opinion - but if McCrystal really was putting his career on the chopping block, to save the lives of military men and women caught in a war strategy without a victory plan trying to win, to get our military home. Nation building never, NEVER, works... we can throw billions of dollars and thousands of American military lives, it will never gain our trust to the citizens of Afghanistan.
If our military on the ground are telling their general that they have their hands tied, they have to be too concerned about relationships and civilian protection instead of cleaning out the Taliban..... I say "Game Over"! Bring our volunteer men and women in uniform home, don't play political games with their lives.
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