McMess

The case for firing McChrystal and the case against. I don’t have a strong opinion on this yet, as the complexities of the issue (e.g., what McChrystal said or did not say, what constitutes insubordination, and the difficulties of replacing McChrystal in the middle of the war) are beyond my capacity to analyze at this point. However, I agree with Politico that McMess is not a one-off incident, but part of a much larger problem:

McChrystal’s comments have laid bare a nasty internal battle among members of Obama’s joint military-civilian Afghanistan team that is splintered by personality conflicts and divided over how to end the longest war in American history.

Underlying everything is a far bigger problem. Obama’s strategy of shifting the military’s focus – and 30,000 troops – from Iraq to Afghanistan hasn’t yet yielded a major breakthrough. And it’s not clear how many troops he will be able to pull out of the country by next July, his self-imposed deadline for commencing withdrawal…

The lack of tangible success seems to be splitting official Washington, slowly but inexorably, into hawks and doves…