STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL AND THE PETER PRINCIPLE

Because it is better for a president to be thought of as petty and vindictive than to be thought of as vacillating and weak, Barack Hussein Obama had to fire his commander in Afghanistan.

General Stanley McChrystal wasn’t actually insubordinate.  But the reporting of the Rolling Stone article that sparked this controversy gave the impression he was.

It had to hurt a man with an ego as large as Mr. Obama’s to read this description of their first one-on-one meeting:

"‘It was a ten minute photo op,’ said an adviser to McChrystal.  ‘Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was.  Here’s the guy who’s going to run his (expletive) war, but he didn’t seem very engaged.  The Boss was pretty disappointed.’"

Few doubt this characterization of Mr. Obama’s detachment is true.

But it was an unnamed adviser, not Gen. McChrystal, who made the remark to reporter Michael Hastings.  And the shots taken in the article at Vice President Joe Biden, National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Special Representative Richard Holbrooke and "the wimps in the White House" all were attributed to aides and advisers, not to the general himself.

  Still, this was Gen. McChrystal’s second flirtation with insubordination.  And Mr. Obama already appeared vacillating and weak in his conduct of foreign policy and in his response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The thoughts expressed are not rare in the U.S. military, but they are not supposed to be expressed publicly. It was appallingly poor judgment for Gen. McChrystal’s aides to be so frank with a Rolling Stone reporter, and for Gen. McChrystal to have granted him such access. 

"If an officer cannot figure out Rolling Stone, how can he understand the Taliban?" wondered military historian Victor Davis Hanson.  Or as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times put it:

"So this general with the background in intelligence who is supposed to conquer Afghanistan can’t even figure out what Rolling Stone is? We’re not talking Guns & Ammo here; we’re talking the antiwar hippie magazine."

The judgment was so appallingly poor some suspect it was deliberate.  Among them is the author of the Rolling Stone article.

"I think they were frustrated with how the policy was going, and I think there was an intent on their part to get a message out about that frustration," Mr. Hastings told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Losing a war causes frustration.

Gen. McChrystal and his aides are frustrated because the deadline for beginning withdrawing troops that Mr. Obama set for next July deprives them of realistic hope of victory.

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo, told Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard about a conversation he had when he visited Afghanistan earlier this year.

"This Afghan leader told Barrasso that within hours of Obama’s speech word spread that the Americans would be leaving in 2011," Mr. Hayes wrote.  "Almost immediately local and national leaders began a mad scramble to ally themselves with anyone with lots of guns and some popular support, entities that would be around when the Americans left — the Taliban, the Haqqani network, the Pakistani military and, yes, Iran."

And Gen. McChrystal’s soldiers are frustrated by bizarrely restrictive rules of engagement which make it easier for the enemy to kill them; harder for them to kill the enemy.

Barack Obama has not been a wartime leader in the mold of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt.  Since appointing him, Mr. Obama’s only other face-to-face meeting with Gen. McChrystal was to chew him out for criticizing a nutty plan floated by Mr. Biden. 

Perhaps the only way Gen. McChrystal could have gotten Mr. Obama interested in Afghanistan is if he’d built a golf course there.

But Gen. McChrystal hasn’t been a Grant or MacArthur, either.  Laurence Peter famously said people in the corporate world tend to be promoted to a level beyond their competence:  his famous "Peter Principle."  This happens in the military, too.  A superb special operator, Gen. McChrystal seemed out of his depth on the larger stage.

Gen. McChrystal is more responsible than is the president for the restrictive rules of engagement, and he turned a blind eye to the massive corruption of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

President Obama has replaced Gen. McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus, the hero of Iraq.  This is the first decision he’s made in the war of which I approve.  But it will mean nothing unless the deadline for troop withdrawal is dropped; the rules of engagement rewritten, and a better strategic partner than Hamid Karzai found.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.