President Obama could have come out and said, "I don't have to fire McChrystal to show that I'm in charge of this situation. The general stays and that's that." It would have signalled to the parties involved that backstabbing and snarking was OK, but a strong leader could have had that corralled in short order with private meetings. The only flaw is that we don't have a strong leader, we've got an insecure novice who's never managed so much as a Dairy Queen. There is no subtlety to his management style, no calculation. Instead, it's always ham-fisted from his partisan, bullying speeches to his spastic response to crises.
KT,
ReplyDeleteStrongly disagree. This was more important than whether the President feels strong or not, McChrystal had to be fired for the reasons cited. Information Dissemination thinks that Secretary Gates convinced Obama to do so, but I would have advised the same way.
The real issue is whether the President is really engaged on the war effort in the first place. It is not going that well and his half measures look to have turned out to be just that. Karzai is going to have to negotiate a peace with the warlords, sans Taliban, but he would be in a stronger position if we had committed more troops earlier.