... only if Obama has learned the lessons of the attenuated McChrystal debacle. Lesson No. 1 should be to revisit some of his initial hiring decisions. The general’s significant role in the Pentagon’s politically motivated cover-up of Pat Tillman’s friendly-fire death in 2004 should have been disqualifying from the start. The official investigation into that scandal — finding that McChrystal peddled “inaccurate and misleading assertions” — was unambiguous and damning.Rich echoed what I wrote in Trouble is, McCrystal never should have happened
Once made the top commander in Afghanistan, the general was kept on long past his expiration date. He should have been cashiered after he took his first public shot at Joe Biden during a London speaking appearance last October. That’s when McChrystal said he would not support the vice president’s more limited war strategy, should the president choose it over his own. According to Jonathan Alter in his book “The Promise,” McChrystal’s London remarks also disclosed information from a C.I.A. report that the general “had no authority to declassify.” These weren’t his only offenses. McChrystal had gone on a showboating personal publicity tour that culminated with “60 Minutes” — even as his own histrionic Afghanistan recommendation somehow leaked to Bob Woodward, disrupting Obama’s war deliberations. The president was livid, Alter writes, but McChrystal was spared because of a White House consensus that he was naïve, not “out of control.”
We now know, thanks to Hastings, that the general was out of control and the White House was naïve. The price has been huge.
You know ... it's another repeat of the age old story of Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage:
And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red [pottage]; for I [am] faint: therefore was his name called Edom.The old men with wealth and power are selling the long term value of our great nation for their own selfish short term greed. And their decisions follow a pattern of greed rather than ethical values ... even to the point of choosing generals who will bend ethical rules as long as it advances the old men's imperialist drive for control of the globe's resources at the lowest possible unit price. Trouble is, this general began to think he could get away with bending rules beyond the limits of the old men with wealth and power.
And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright.
And Esau said, Behold, I [am] at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?
And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he sware unto him: and he sold his birthright unto Jacob.
Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised [his] birthright.
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