The top U.S. war commander in Afghanistan is being called to the White House for a meeting with President Obama after issuing an apology Tuesday for an interview in which he took shots at top administration officials and his staff described the president as unprepared for their first one-on-one encounter.
In the article in this week's issue of Rolling Stone, Gen. Stanley McChrystal also said he felt betrayed and blind-sided by his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.
McChrystal's comments are reverberating through Washington and the Pentagon after the magazine depicted him as a lone wolf on the outs with many important figures in the Obama administration.
Some conservatives, like Laura Ingraham, have been downplaying just how unprofessional these comments were and instead holding them out as another sign of the chaos of the Obama administration. That's a mistake. Thes comments are inexcusable. Last I checked, most of the folks that were disparaged in the Rolling Stone piece are folks that McChrystal reports to.
I don't know what things are like on the ground in Afghanistan. It's very possible that things are chaotic on the ground and McChrystal may feel as though the administration isn't giving him the support necessary to win. That's no excuse for trashing most of it in public like this. The military relies on discipline and respect for the chain of command is tantamount to that discipline. McChrystal wouldn't stand for any soldier saying something like this about him to the media and no one should accept him doing it.
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