The Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal by Michael Hastings made all kinds of news last week. People were very upset! Eventually the General was fired or resigned or something. But I get the feeling that few if anyone who loudly bloviated on the subject actually read the piece, which in fairness is thousands of words long. While reading it I repeatedly thought "The guy got canned for this?" I thought it seemed pretty flattering, for an article in Rolling Stone Magazine about a man whose job is to organize the killing of people. It didn't even include the phrase "vampire squid." Anyway: Here are things I copied and pasted that may or may not make sense taken out of context. Oh, and read it yourself here if you want.
"'I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,' McChrystal says.
He pauses a beat.
'Unfortunately,' he adds, "no one in this room could do it.'"
"COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps."
"The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs."
"By midnight at Kitty O'Shea's, much of Team America is completely shitfaced. Two officers do an Irish jig mixed with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding dance, while McChrystal's top advisers lock arms and sing a slurred song of their own invention. "Afghanistan!" they bellow. "Afghanistan!" They call it their Afghanistan song."
"McChrystal steps away from the circle, observing his team. "All these men," he tells me. 'I'd die for them. And they'd die for me.'"
"Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far – especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th."
"After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters."
"McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in a war zone. It's "insurgent math," as he calls it – for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies...There's talk of creating a new medal for "courageous restraint," a buzzword that's unlikely to gain much traction in the gung-ho culture of the U.S. military."
"'I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they're all fucked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don't understand it themselves. But we're fucking losing this thing.'"
"Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan"
"So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war."
