Obama and the general

American politics

Lexington's notebook

Obama and the general

Will he or won't he?

by Lexington

WHAT I can't really forgive is that General McChrystal prefers Bud to Bordeaux, though that's not a sacking offence in itself. As to which way the president is going to decide, the Uniform Code of Military Justice says that an officer who uses contemptuous words towards the president or vice-president can be punished by a court-martial. It must be sorely tempting for Mr Obama to dismiss a repeat offender who has shown ingratitude as well as disrespect. After what some said was an over-long review of Afghan strategy in the autumn of last year, Mr Obama backed General McChrystal’s counter-insurgency ideas and gave him most of the extra troops he asked for—despite the fact that last year too the general flirted with insubordination by mocking the opposing views of Joe Biden. If Mr Obama leaves the general in his job he will humiliate the vice-president and make himself look weak just when he was trying to be assertive. How can you respect a president who bullies an unmartial foreign oil executive but cannot whip his own generals into line?

The problem is that sacking the general holds an equally big political danger. It will expose Mr Obama to the charge of putting the amour propre of the White House above the successful prosecution of a difficult war. It will be said, whether it is true or not, that changing the man at the top might disrupt the counter-insurgency campaign just at the beginning of the fighting season. And although plenty of generals might take his place, General McChrystal was Mr Obama’s hand-picked replacement for General David McKiernan, the commander the new president inherited from George Bush. Not long ago, in other words, Mr Obama deemed General McChrystal uniquely qualified to wage war in Afghanistan. Sacking him now gives the Republicans a golden opportunity to say that Mr Obama is taking petty revenge against a dedicated warrior guilty only of too much candour and a want of tact. General McChrsytal in Afghanistan is not Douglas MacArthur in Korea: he is obeying orders, not defying them.

Mr Obama cannot win in these circumstances, only strive to minimise his losses. The immediate danger if he handles the affair badly is that the war effort will suffer and he will be blamed for it. A worry for the longer term is that Americans might once again come to think, as they did before Iraq turned sour, that the Democrats are less able than Republicans to handle the armed services and look after national security. That might not count for much in the coming mid-terms, which will be dominated by economic worries, but it could matter in 2012, by when General David Petraeus might have entered politics. And it would be a wretched irony after all the work Mr Obama has put into guarding this flank: keeping on Robert Gates as defence secretary, avoiding Bill Clinton’s mistake of moving too fast on gays in the military and intensifying the “good war” in Afghanistan, despite all the risks and the howls of his own left wing. What a pity that the man he sent to win the war had such a big ego, and such a loud mouth.