General McChrystal Resigns

[MAGNES]

Cause of comments made to Rolling Stone Magazine.

Breaking: General Stanley McChrystal tenders his resignation
RESIGNS (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyharnden/100044536/breaking-general-stanley-mcchrystal-tenders-his-resignation/)

Is Gen. Stanley McChrystal someone the president can afford to fire?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/22/AR2010062202069_pf.html

McChrystal’s Fate Is Unclear as Obama Cites Poor Judgment
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/world/asia/23mcchrystal.html?hp

W.H. signals Gen. McChrystal's job on the line
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38837.html


Consider, McChyrstal pushed for troop surge putting Obama on the spot,
it was not appreciated and divided white house, he got his men, also, many
have spoken out and resigned cause of war in Afghanistan, telling the truth,
they are not fighting "alqueda" which does not exist, even according to
NSA Jones, "less than 100 in country", they are fighting locals coming out
to repel invaders, consider WIKILEAKS controversy and timing here, it is
for real, the war is not winable, nothing McChrystal said comes from him
and his men being loose canons, these guys are special forces that have
deliberately killed civilians, destroyed Iraq getting the civilians, Shia/Sunni
to kill themselves, nothing they do is without calculation,
most Americans do not read the wires and do no know McChrystals history,
he runs death squads in Iraq, and Afghanistan even, even running
murdering mercenaries many of which are not Americans but Israelis.
McChrystal was one Bush's key people operating under Negroponte,
all this is publicly available info from news, Negroponte has history of
running death squads in Vietnam, South America and was sent over to
Iraq to do just that. Consider also others, key people are jumping ship,
rats leaving a sinking ship, all coincidence, key movements of key ships
in ME, etc, etc, you don't just abandon your men like that on eve of major offensive.
What's up ?

Just like many key people that were marginalized or resigned from
Bush NeoCon Admin, McChrystal will be spilling some beans distancing
himself from policy as a soldier, he already did that blaming Obama
and his appointments. They are not supposed to win the war, he knows
it.

[MAGNES]

McChrystal's first one-on-one meeting with Obama:

It was a 10-minute photo op," says 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 fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

[MAGNES]

I will read and highlight, long article, must reading IMO.

McChrystal obviously does not give a sh*t anymore.


The Runaway General

Stanley McChrystal, Obama's top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

By Michael Hastings
Jun 22, 2010 10:00 AM EDT

This article appears in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.

PAGE 1

How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.

McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.

"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"

McChrystal gives him the middle finger.

The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux,
Talladega Nights

(his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.

"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.

"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.

McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've f*cked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.

"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."

With that, he's out the door.

"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.

"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's f*cking gay."

The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the f*ck up, and keep a lower profile

Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"

"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says 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 f*cking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

PAGE 2

From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. 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. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.

As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the f*ckers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of "mission failure." The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass.

Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. "I found that time painful," McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. "I was selling an unsellable position." For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics – a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks. "The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people," says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.

In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words "victory" or "win," Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.

Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.

Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win," says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. "This is going to end in an argument."

The night after his speech in Paris, McChrystal and his staff head to Kitty O'Shea's, an Irish pub catering to tourists, around the corner from the hotel. His wife, Annie, has joined him for a rare visit: Since the Iraq War began in 2003, she has seen her husband less than 30 days a year. Though it is his and Annie's 33rd wedding anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle along for dinner and drinks at the "least Gucci" place his staff could find. His wife isn't surprised. "He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was dressed in formalwear," she says with a laugh.

The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority. After arriving in Kabul last summer, Team America set about changing the culture of the International Security Assistance Force, as the NATO-led mission is known. (U.S. soldiers had taken to deriding ISAF as short for "I Suck at Fighting" or "In Sandals and Flip-Flops.") McChrystal banned alcohol on base, kicked out Burger King and other symbols of American excess, expanded the morning briefing to include thousands of officers and refashioned the command center into a Situational Awareness Room, a free-flowing information hub modeled after Mayor Mike Bloomberg's offices in New York. He also set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each morning, and eating one meal a day. (In the month I spend around the general, I witness him eating only once.) It's a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around him, a staple in almost every media profile, as if the ability to go without sleep and food translates into the possibility of a man single-handedly winning the war.

By midnight at Kitty O'Shea's, much of Team America is completely sh*tfaced. 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."

[I am me, I am free]

McChrystal's first one-on-one meeting with Obama:

It was a 10-minute photo op," says 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 f*cking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."


So who do you think is running the show? Gates?

[gunDriller]

do you think McChrystal has the conscience to become a whistleblower ?

what do ex-generals do, anyway ? join the Carlyle group ? get a job working for a defense contractor ? lobby for Israel ? give speeches ?

[MAGNES]

PAGE 4

By some accounts, McChrystal's career should have been over at least two times by now. As Pentagon spokesman during the invasion of Iraq, the general seemed more like a White House mouthpiece than an up-and-coming commander with a reputation for speaking his mind. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous "stuff happens" remark during the looting of Baghdad, McChrystal backed him up. A few days later, he echoed the president's Mission Accomplished gaffe by insisting that major combat operations in Iraq were over. But it was during his next stint – overseeing the military's most elite units, including the Rangers, Navy Seals and Delta Force – that McChrystal took part in a cover-up that would have destroyed the career of a lesser man.

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. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough – a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. "If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public," he wrote, it could cause "public embarrassment" for the president.

[ TILLMAN WAS MURDERED ]

"The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions," wrote Tillman's mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the "golden boy" of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman's death, McChrystal was promoted to major general.

Two years later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a scandal involving detainee abuse and torture at Camp Nama in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar litany of abuse: stress positions, being dragged naked through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined in the scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported seeing him inspect the prison multiple times. But the experience was so unsettling to McChrystal that he tried to prevent detainee operations from being placed under his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a "political swamp," according to a U.S. official. In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan.

The media, to a large extent, have also given McChrystal a pass on both controversies. Where Gen. Petraeus is kind of a dweeb, a teacher's pet with a Ranger's tab, McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a "Jedi" commander, as Newsweek called him. He didn't care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response. He gets briefings on his iPod and listens to books on tape. He carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars, and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee. ("There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.") He went out on dozens of nighttime raids during his time in Iraq, unprecedented for a top commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with almost no entourage. "The f*cking lads love Stan McChrystal," says a British officer who serves in Kabul. "You'd be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like 'Who the f*ck is that?' And it's f*cking Stan McChrystal."

It doesn't hurt that McChrystal was also extremely successful as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite forces that carry out the government's darkest ops. During the Iraq surge, his team killed and captured thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. "JSOC was a killing machine," says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of operations. McChrystal was also open to new ways of killing. He systematically mapped out terrorist networks, targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down – often with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally shunned by the military. "The Boss would find the 24-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some f*cking brilliant degree from MIT, sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors humming," says a Special Forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq and now serves on his staff in Kabul. "He'd say, 'Hey – you f*cking muscleheads couldn't find lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.' "

Even in his new role as America's leading evangelist for counterinsurgency, McChrystal retains the deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units in Afghanistan from four to 19. "You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight," McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he'll add, "I'm going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though." In fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.

Despite the tragedies and miscues, 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. He has ordered convoys to curtail their reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air power and severely limited night raids. He regularly apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are killed, and berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths. "For a while," says one U.S. official, "the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in front of McChrystal after a 'civ cas' incident." The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: 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.

But however strategic they may be, McChrystal's new marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. "Bottom line?" says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing."

In March, McChrystal traveled to Combat Outpost JFM – a small encampment on the outskirts of Kandahar – to confront such accusations from the troops directly. It was a typically bold move by the general. Only two days earlier, he had received an e-mail from Israel Arroyo, a 25-year-old staff sergeant who asked McChrystal to go on a mission with his unit. "I am writing because it was said you don't care about the troops and have made it harder to defend ourselves," Arroyo wrote.

Within hours, McChrystal responded personally: "I'm saddened by the accusation that I don't care about soldiers, as it is something I suspect any soldier takes both personally and professionally – at least I do. But I know perceptions depend upon your perspective at the time, and I respect that every soldier's view is his own." Then he showed up at Arroyo's outpost and went on a foot patrol with the troops – not some bullsh*t photo-op stroll through a market, but a real live operation in a dangerous war zone.

Six weeks later, just before McChrystal returned from Paris, the general received another e-mail from Arroyo. A 23-year-old corporal named Michael Ingram – one of the soldiers McChrystal had gone on patrol with – had been killed by an IED a day earlier. It was the third man the 25-member platoon had lost in a year, and Arroyo was writing to see if the general would attend Ingram's memorial service. "He started to look up to you," Arroyo wrote. McChrystal said he would try to make it down to pay his respects as soon as possible.

The night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt. Arroyo's platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram's death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal's new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied. "These were abandoned houses," fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks. "Nobody was coming back to live in them."

[MAGNES]

PAGE 5

One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. "Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force," the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that's like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won't have to make arrests. "Does that make any f*cking sense?" asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. "We should just drop a f*cking bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?"

The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they've been distorted as they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. "f*ck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our f*cking gun on," says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. "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 f*cked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don't understand it themselves. But we're f*cking losing this thing."

McChrystal and his team show up the next day. Underneath a tent, the general has a 45-minute discussion with some two dozen soldiers. The atmosphere is tense. "I ask you what's going on in your world, and I think it's important for you all to understand the big picture as well," McChrystal begins. "How's the company doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody? Anybody feel like you're losing?" McChrystal says.

"Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we're losing, sir," says Hicks.

McChrystal nods. "Strength is leading when you just don't want to lead," he tells the men. "You're leading by example. That's what we do. Particularly when it's really, really hard, and it hurts inside." Then he spends 20 minutes talking about counterinsurgency, diagramming his concepts and principles on a whiteboard. He makes COIN seem like common sense, but he's careful not to bullsh*t the men. "We are knee-deep in the decisive year," he tells them. The Taliban, he insists, no longer has the initiative – "but I don't think we do, either." It's similar to the talk he gave in Paris, but it's not winning any hearts and minds among the soldiers. "This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks," McChrystal tries to joke. "But it doesn't get the same reception from infantry companies."

During the question-and-answer period, the frustration boils over. The soldiers complain about not being allowed to use lethal force, about watching insurgents they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to be able to fight – like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal. "We aren't putting fear into the Taliban," one soldier says.

"Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing," McChrystal says, citing an oft-repeated maxim that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan. "The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn't work."

"I'm not saying go out and kill everybody, sir," the soldier persists. "You say we've stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don't believe that's true in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it's getting."

"I agree with you," McChrystal says. "In this area, we've not made progress, probably. You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I'm telling you is, fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe the population out here and resettle it?"

A soldier complains that under the rules, any insurgent who doesn't have a weapon is immediately assumed to be a civilian. "That's the way this game is," McChrystal says. "It's complex. I can't just decide: It's shirts and skins, and we'll kill all the shirts."

As the discussion ends, McChrystal seems to sense that he hasn't succeeded at easing the men's anger. He makes one last-ditch effort to reach them, acknowledging the death of Cpl. Ingram. "There's no way I can make that easier," he tells them. "No way I can pretend it won't hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel that. . . . I will tell you, you're doing a great job. Don't let the frustration get to you." The session ends with no clapping, and no real resolution. McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren't buying it.

PAGE 6

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there's nothing for us there."

In mid-May, two weeks after visiting the troops in Kandahar, McChrystal travels to the White House for a high-level visit by Hamid Karzai. It is a triumphant moment for the general, one that demonstrates he is very much in command – both in Kabul and in Washington. In the East Room, which is packed with journalists and dignitaries, President Obama sings the praises of Karzai. The two leaders talk about how great their relationship is, about the pain they feel over civilian casualties. They mention the word "progress" 16 times in under an hour. But there is no mention of victory. Still, the session represents the most forceful commitment that Obama has made to McChrystal's strategy in months. "There is no denying the progress that the Afghan people have made in recent years – in education, in health care and economic development," the president says. "As I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed – lights that would not have been visible just a few years earlier."

It is a disconcerting observation for Obama to make. During the worst years in Iraq, when the Bush administration had no real progress to point to, officials used to offer up the exact same evidence of success. "It was one of our first impressions," one GOP official said in 2006, after landing in Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. "So many lights shining brightly." So it is to the language of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned – talk of progress, of city lights, of metrics like health care and education. Rhetoric that just a few years ago they would have mocked. "They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because victory is not even defined or recognizable," says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. "That's the game we're in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn't get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future."

But facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply f*cked up things are in Afghanistan. "If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further. "There's a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here," a senior military official in Kabul tells me.

Back in Afghanistan, less than a month after the White House meeting with Karzai and all the talk of "progress," McChrystal is hit by the biggest blow to his vision of counterinsurgency. Since last year, the Pentagon had been planning to launch a major military operation this summer in Kandahar, the country's second-largest city and the Taliban's original home base. It was supposed to be a decisive turning point in the war – the primary reason for the troop surge that McChrystal wrested from Obama late last year. But on June 10th, acknowledging that the military still needs to lay more groundwork, the general announced that he is postponing the offensive until the fall. Rather than one big battle, like Fallujah or Ramadi, U.S. troops will implement what McChrystal calls a "rising tide of security." The Afghan police and army will enter Kandahar to attempt to seize control of neighborhoods, while the U.S. pours $90 million of aid into the city to win over the civilian population.

Even proponents of counterinsurgency are hard-pressed to explain the new plan. "This isn't a classic operation," says a U.S. military official. "It's not going to be Black Hawk Down. There aren't going to be doors kicked in." Other U.S. officials insist that doors are going to be kicked in, but that it's going to be a kinder, gentler offensive than the disaster in Marja. "The Taliban have a jackboot on the city," says a military official. "We have to remove them, but we have to do it in a way that doesn't alienate the population." When Vice President Biden was briefed on the new plan in the Oval Office, insiders say he was shocked to see how much it mirrored the more gradual plan of counterterrorism that he advocated last fall. "This looks like CT-plus!" he said, according to U.S. officials familiar with the meeting.

Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. "Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.

This article appears in in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.

[MAGNES]

I will highlight it, it was already clear without reading it where it would go,
I have been reading antiwar.com regularly, lots of explosive stuff on there
from military and many that have resigned, many explosive admissions,
everything in msm is a lie, these guys are jumping ship and blaming the
admin for crippling them, they even blame the CIA and their drone attacks
on civilians, they are being set up for the fall and don't appreciate it, and
they are right, nobody is supposed to win, we are supposed to be there
forever, this is tied to wikilieaks for sure right now, timing is perfect.

Article has explosive stuff in it, spitting in Obama admin face,
McChrystal and his men did this on purpose.

Many have already spoken out, it just does not get msm coverage,
if it did that would be it.

Consider Colin Powell and his aide.

Top Bush aides pushed for Guantánamo torture
Senior officials bypassed army chief to introduce interrogation methods
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/19/guantanamo.usa

CIA Stonewall
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8817

Consider, long ago, JAG refused to be involved, stated
all are being railroaded, look it up, that was 2004.

Feith, Wolfiwitz, Perle, see Sibel Edmonds, they ran the whole show.


"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made,� Mr. Wilkerson said

Wilkerson told the Associated Press that he was informed by briefings, and military commanders, that big brass knew those captured had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, or the so-called war on terror, but held them anyway as information-gathering tools for a so-called “mosaic� of intelligence.

* the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

* According to Wilkerson, fewer than 10% of the 240, or 24 men, who remain at the detention camp, in Cuba, can be considered a security risk

Moreover, Powell’s former chief of staff insists that the process by which these “enemy combatants� were so designated itself was shabby and incompetent, and that those sent to Gitmo weren’t properly “vetted� before they were hauled off to Cuba. Pakistanis, Wilkerson added, often acted as bounty hunters, securing as much as $5,000 a head."

[DMac]

MAGNES,

There is definitely something going on behind the scenes re: McChyrstal's resignation. I think you are right that the Wikileaks stuff is related - I just don't know how or why yet.

I am no fan of McChrystal, he is a NeoCon, he has said in the past that the Taliban is training in Iran (following Israel's script to a tee).

This resignation was planned, you don't give an interview with Rolling Stone and lambast your boss on the record.

Something here stinks and I can't put my finger on it.....

[MAGNES]

I didn't say he is a good guy, he is worse than an NeoCon,
had some harsh words for him, this guy ran the dirty war
in Iraq, took it to Afghanistan, rats fleeing a sinking ship,
pinning the blame on each other, it is interesting and good
to see the criminals fighting and divided, even Powell and his
aide did not go far enough, they ain't totally legit either,
they are all dirty, some good people though have resigned,
and many leaks of info is damaging, these people know it
when they open their mouths, like NSA Jones, "less than
100 Alqueda in Afghanistan." Not everyone likes being played
by ZOG even though they go along with it, remember Bush
admin all the people they got rid of. NeoCons won.

I'll highlight it later, gotta go.

[JDRock]

..this is what happens BEFORE military takeovers......jus sayin.

[the riot act]

And lost in the middle of all this theater are tens of thousands of innocent lives snuffed out across the Middle East because a two-bit hustler from Chicago licks the boots of the chicken swingers and those that fawn them. What a world we live in.


Damn that was good! http://www.the3006cafe.org/forum/Smileys/classic/-bouncing-008.gif

[the riot act]

..this is what happens BEFORE military takeovers......jus sayin.


Well if anyone could take DC it is him and his loyal followers. But I'd hate to see where that would lead.

[k-os]

..this is what happens BEFORE military takeovers......jus sayin.


Well if anyone could take DC it is him and his loyal followers. But I'd hate to see where that would lead.


Wow, that is quite a thought though, isn't it?

I am sure it wouldn't end well, but . . . (just daydreaming here a little) it would be nice to get Obama out of office. He's done enough damage, and I think he's got Amnesty on the brain for his next WTF move.

[JohnQPublic]

I didn't say he is a good guy, he is worse than an NeoCon,
had some harsh words for him, this guy ran the dirty war
in Iraq, took it to Afghanistan, rats fleeing a sinking ship,
pinning the blame on each other, it is interesting and good
to see the criminals fighting and divided, even Powell and his
aide did not go far enough, they ain't totally legit either,
they are all dirty, some good people though have resigned,
and many leaks of info is damaging, these people know it
when they open their mouths, like NSA Jones, "less than
100 Alqueda in Afghanistan." Not everyone likes being played
by ZOG even though they go along with it, remember Bush
admin all the people they got rid of. NeoCons won.

I'll highlight it later, gotta go.


McChrystal for Pres, 2012?

[JohnQPublic]

..this is what happens BEFORE military takeovers......jus sayin.

McChrystal for Dictator, 2010? :oo-->

[Horn]

Kinda hard to believe that a General that worked for Israel is going to have any effect when retiring from city that is under its control.

[Libertytree]

I find it absolutely amazing and funny that there are those in the RAP circle that thought he was going to the WH to arrest Obama.

[JDRock]

..this is what happens BEFORE military takeovers......jus sayin.

McChrystal for Dictator, 2010? :oo-->


umm..NO john :oo-->...neither was that inferred, i was pointing out the general ( no pun intended) breakdown of the chain of command or at least the first cracks in it....sad, really.

[MAGNES]

It's clear this is a propaganda piece that is pro McChrystal.

He ain't to blame for anything, lol .

This article does not cover key damaging information out there.

They built the Narco State for one, killed many innocent people,
destroyed Iraq for lies, etc.


Afghanistan Heroin for Europe Protected By Powerful Interests
LOTS OF LINKS (http://)


WHO ARE THEY FIGHTING ?

In October 2009, National Security Adviser James Jones said that al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had been contained and that fewer than 100 members remained in the country.

“The good news is that the Al Qaeda presence is very diminished," Jones said. "I don’t foresee the return of the Taliban. And I want to be very clear: Afghanistan in not in danger�is not in imminent danger�of falling… It would be unwise to rush to a final judgment here.� NSA JAMES JONES

http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2010/04/26/measures-of-ineffectiveness/


CIA DRONES are killing civilians and the military and CIA men
do not like that. Who is running the CIA Drone program ?
Why can't McChyrstal stop it, he is against killing civiilians
in the Rolling Stone article supposedly.

CIA Drone Operators Oppose Strikes as Helping al-Qaeda
"Some CIA officers involved in the agency’s drone strikes program in Pakistan and elsewhere are privately expressing their opposition to the program within the agency, because it is helping al-Qaeda and its allies recruit, according to a retired military officer in contact with them."
CIA speak out against drone strikes (http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2010/06/03/cia-drone-operators-oppose-strikes-as-helping-al-qaeda/)

more on drones killing
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/06/24/at-least-35-civilians-killed-in-us-drone-strike-on-funeral/
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/01/02/us-killed-700-civilians-in-pakistan-drone-strikes-in-2009/

The timing of this is interesting.
WIKILEAKS ICELAND and the New Masscre Video
http://gold-silver.us/forum/general-discussion/wikileaks-iceland-and-the-new-masscre-video/

[Neuro]

Budweiser Light Lime, isn't that gay? He certainly has done a lot of political maneuvering for being an allegedly straight forward guy...

[JohnQPublic]

..this is what happens BEFORE military takeovers......jus sayin.

McChrystal for Dictator, 2010? :oo-->


umm..NO john :oo-->...neither was that inferred, i was pointing out the general ( no pun intended) breakdown of the chain of command or at least the first cracks in it....sad, really.


I think what we are seeing is the rats jumping from the ship (similar to Peter Orszag bailing from the Obama administration (http://www.zerohedge.com/article/obama-budget-director-peter-orzsag-out-becomes-first-economic-adviser-bail)).The implication was mine. I just stretched my previous McChyrstal for pres 2012 comment., and used your comment as a pivot . :D

It is more than sad, it is a disaster that has hit our country, and the entire federal govt. has completely failed us and stabbed us in the back in favor of their controllers (the banks, Fed, etc.). Not that I would have expected any different.

[JDRock]

And lost in the middle of all this theater are tens of thousands of innocent lives snuffed out across the Middle East because a two-bit hustler from Chicago licks the boots of the chicken swingers and those that fawn them. What a world we live in.


WOW ....you have a gift sir.

[Twisted Titan]

And to think:

All this Blood,mayhem,lies,misery Tears and death. Is only made possible with our Tax dollars ( state and Federal)

dam that is messed up.


T

[crazychicken]

snip/snip

a two-bit hustler from Chicago licks the boots of the chicken swingers and those that fawn them. What a world we live in.



What a statement-Two thumbs up for that description.

CC

[Marv]

I think what we are seeing is the rats jumping from the ship
+1

[Twisted Titan]

I think what we are seeing is the rats jumping from the ship
+1


They didnt get to top of the shit pile by being lucky.

Rats know when to make a exit

November will be a "Genocide" for the democrats.

But more important

People know the repukes will do nothing either.

Heads will roll

LITERALLY.

T

[Bullfrog]

Jiminy Crickets! That was an interesting article in Rolling Stones.
Gordon Duff thinks that someone sent the reporter after him, I disagree and think that McChrystal just committed suicide by reporter.

“WOUNDED IN AMBUSH" (http://mycatbirdseat.com/2010/06/gordon-duff-general-mcchrystal-%E2%80%9Cwounded%E2%80%9D-in-ambush%E2%80%A6-by-rolling-stone-magazine/)

This is just speculation on my part so you know what that means...
We got more ships on the way towards the vicinity of Iran.
A short while back McChrystal said that neither we nor Israel need to be starting a war with Iran.

Maybe Obama finally caved to the zionists, and said ok to attack Iran, like now...
I am sure the Air Force stepped forward and said they could take care of it, and maybe they could, if the goal was just to flatten everything.

This makes things tougher in Afghanistan, and Iraq.
McChrystal decides that if Obama isn't gonna listen to him then the hell with it, and calls in the reporter.

Like I said, just guessing here.

[Silver Rocket Bitches!]

This guy is a straight up piece of shit!

I wonder who will replace him? A bigger piece of shit Obama yes man?

[DMac]

This guy is a straight up piece of sh*t!

I wonder who will replace him? A bigger piece of sh*t Obama yes man?


It was already announced that Petraeus will run both CentCom and Afghanistan.

[Twisted Titan]

Jiminy Crickets! That was an interesting article in Rolling Stones.
Gordon Duff thinks that someone sent the reporter after him, I disagree and think that McChrystal just committed suicide by reporter.

“WOUNDED IN AMBUSH" (http://mycatbirdseat.com/2010/06/gordon-duff-general-mcchrystal-%E2%80%9Cwounded%E2%80%9D-in-ambush%E2%80%A6-by-rolling-stone-magazine/)

This is just speculation on my part so you know what that means...
We got more ships on the way towards the vicinity of Iran.
A short while back McChrystal said that neither we nor Israel need to be starting a war with Iran.




If this was allowed to see print


Could you image how deep the rabbit hole goes???

[MAGNES]

“WOUNDED IN AMBUSH" (http://mycatbirdseat.com/2010/06/gordon-duff-general-mcchrystal-%E2%80%9Cwounded%E2%80%9D-in-ambush%E2%80%A6-by-rolling-stone-magazine/)

This is just speculation on my part so you know what that means...
We got more ships on the way towards the vicinity of Iran.
A short while back McChrystal said that neither we nor Israel need to be starting a war with Iran.

Maybe Obama finally caved to the zionists, and said ok to attack Iran, like now...
I am sure the Air Force stepped forward and said they could take care of it, and maybe they could, if the goal was just to flatten everything.

This makes things tougher in Afghanistan, and Iraq.
McChrystal decides that if Obama isn't gonna listen to him then the hell with it, and calls in the reporter.



Good link, and you are right about all that is going on.

A lot of stuff is going on behind the scenes, Holbrooke runs the show,
good find, he is the key Zionist/Jew in charge, good find, he was in
charge during the attacks on the Serbs bringing jihadists in from this
region to help Albanians and Muslims against Serbs and Croatians.
Albanians today distribute these drugs from Afghanistan going
through Turkey, all a coincidence, ? , not .

“Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke… I don’t even want to open it.�

I wonder what it is about Holbrooke that the general is disturbed by? Could it be drug policy? The Holbrooke policy of paying the Taliban to grow more drugs is, I think, an original approach to eradication. Colonel Eugene Khruschev, former First Secretary of the Russian Embassy in Kabul, now commentator for RTV and editor of Veterans Today refers to Holbrooke as Afghanistan’s “drug kingpin� in partnership with “Karzai brothers incorporated.� Do you think this might be what might be disturbing the general?

[JohnQPublic]

I didn't say he is a good guy, he is worse than an NeoCon,
had some harsh words for him, this guy ran the dirty war
in Iraq, took it to Afghanistan, rats fleeing a sinking ship,
pinning the blame on each other, it is interesting and good
to see the criminals fighting and divided, even Powell and his
aide did not go far enough, they ain't totally legit either,
they are all dirty, some good people though have resigned,
and many leaks of info is damaging, these people know it
when they open their mouths, like NSA Jones, "less than
100 Alqueda in Afghanistan." Not everyone likes being played
by ZOG even though they go along with it, remember Bush
admin all the people they got rid of. NeoCons won.

I'll highlight it later, gotta go.


McChrystal for Pres, 2012?


Perhaps I missed the forest for the trees (http://tarpley.net/2010/06/23/towards-the-eighteenth-brumaire-of-general-david-petraeus/#more-1579)?

"...In addition to all this, important results of the McChrystal ouster will probably be seen in US domestic politics. Obama has now committed the absolutely idiotic blunder of making General Petraeus far greater and far more important than he already was, despite the fact that General Petraeus is his most likely and credible Republican presidential challenger in 2012, and the one most capable of defeating Obama..."

(Webster G. Tarpley)

Just to continue a bit, because this is good stuff:

"Obama has now chosen the tactic guaranteed to concentrate public attention on the ambitious and unprincipled Petraeus, who has all the character weaknesses of a Hindenburg. At the same time, Obama has given Petraeus the totally impossible assignment of winning victory in the Afghanistan quagmire, the graveyard of empires. Petraeus is doomed to fail on the purely military level, and the more he fails the more he will he impelled to pick a political quarrel with Obama about strategy and the conduct of the war as a way of shifting the opprobrium of defeat off his own four-star epaulets and onto the back of the feckless Obama. The most obvious issue to use for this purpose is Obama’s timetable, established in the West Point speech last December, of beginning the departure of US forces from Afghanistan in July of 2011, timed of course to coincide with the Iowa straw poll and the beginning of the 2012 presidential primary campaigns.

Petraeus’ obvious option will be to break with Obama during the late spring or early summer of 2011 over Obama’s intent to protect his own vulnerable left flank in the Democratic Party base by initiating an Afghan pullout, which Petraeus and his neocon backers have already branded as Obama’s cut and run policy. Petraeus will be able to wave the bloody shirt of the US Afghanistan dead, condemning Obama for making their sacrifices vain for his own self-serving political purposes. Petraeus will be able to claim that he is reluctantly leaving his military post because the appeaser and weakling Obama has tied his hands to the point that he has no other alternative but to take the issue to the voters in the primaries and in the presidential election itself. Ironically, the worse the military situation in Afghanistan becomes, the better this strategy would work.

Unless something changes very soon, we may soon witness here in the United States the classic process of the disintegration of a form of government which often occurs when a weak civilian regime decides to place a major bet on the ability of a charismatic military commander to save them politically by winning a foreign war in the way that the civilians and their previous military appointees had been unable to do. Historically speaking, the tendency is for the charismatic military commander to return home and seize power, ousting the civilians who had tried to benefit from his victories."

[Bullfrog]

Gordon Duff has just become my favorite author on the internet. I can't do justice to the article by pulling a couple of quotes, you need to read the whole thing.

THE AFGHANISTAN CIRCUS, McCHRYSTAL LEAVES THE CENTER RING (http://mycatbirdseat.com/2010/06/gordon-duff-the-afghanistan-circus-mcchrystal-leaves-the-center-ring/)

[Neuro]

I dreamt/had this early morning vision right after waking up, that the real reason for General McChrystals stepdown was that very soon the war on Iran will begin. Which Petreus will be held responsible to in terms of it's success. When/if it backfires McChrystal will be asked to step in and save the situation. At this point they only want one reliable person to be in charge when the attack on Iran begins, and it is only weeks away... McChrystal can later claim that the only reason for this article and his resignation was the warplans, but because of his loyalty to the president, he decided to do something that appeared to be professional suicide, rather than spill the beans about the plans...

[MAGNES]

I dreamt/had this early morning vision right after waking up, that the real reason for General McChrystals stepdown was that very soon the war on Iran will begin.


There is no doubt about Iran and other reasons, they will lose
many men and maybe all of Iraq when they attack Iran, that would
be the ultimate traitorous act of the NeoCons, then they will use
that as a reason to destroy whatever is left.

This was no mistake on McChrystals part and his men.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AyKmkfwzmk

[MAGNES]

SOME CURRENT COMMENTARY


General McChrystal Couldn’t Fake it Anymore

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/06/28/general-macchrystal-couldnt-fake-it-anymore/



The last post: McChrystal's bleak outlook

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-last-post-mcchrystals-bleak-outlook-2011730.html



Drug Use Has Increased in Afghanistan, U.N. Report Says

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/world/asia/22afghan.html?src=mv



President Obama's Secret: Only 100 al Qaeda Now in Afghanistan

With New Surge, One Thousand U.S. Soldiers and $300 Million for Every One al Qaeda Fighter

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/president-obamas-secret-100-al-qaeda-now-afghanistan/story?id=9227861

[MAGNES]

Very Related threads.

Afghanistan Heroin for Europe Protected By Powerful Interests (http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?29815-Afghanistan-Heroin-for-Europe-Protected-By-Powerful-Interests)

U.S. Ambassador to Syria Runs Death Squads, has a history of this, W M . (http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?60974-U-S-Ambassador-to-Syria-Runs-Death-Squads-has-a-history-of-this-W-M)


McCrystal is not a good guy, death squads, heroin, he actually thought he was part of a legit " war " .

He figured out they are not there for a legit war or to win.


Original article, MUST READING ! McCrystal was a part of this reporting, he took shots at Obama, he knew the outcome, one the good things he did.

General Stanley McChrystal: The Runaway General by Michael Hastings | Politics News | Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway-general-20100622)



UPDATE !

Michael Hastings Dead at 33 | Politics News | Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michael-hastings-rolling-stone-contributor-dead-at-33-20130618)

Michael Hastings, the fearless journalist whose reporting brought down the career of General Stanley McChrystal, has died in a car accident in Los Angeles, Rolling Stone has learned. He was 33.

Hastings' unvarnished 2010 profile of McChrystal in the pages of Rolling Stone, "The Runaway General (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway-general-20100622)," captured the then-supreme commander of the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan openly mocking his civilian commanders in the White House.

[Serpo]

Very Related.

Afghanistan Heroin for Europe Protected By Powerful Interests (http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?29815-Afghanistan-Heroin-for-Europe-Protected-By-Powerful-Interests)

U.S. Ambassador to Syria Runs Death Squads, has a history of this, W M . (http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?60974-U-S-Ambassador-to-Syria-Runs-Death-Squads-has-a-history-of-this-W-M)


McCrystal is not a good guy, death squads, heroin, he actually thought he was part of a legit " war " .

He figured out they are not there for a legit war or to win.


Original article, MUST READING ! McCrystal was a part of this reporting, he took shots at Obama, he knew the outcome, one the good things he did.

General Stanley McChrystal: The Runaway General by Michael Hastings | Politics News | Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway-general-20100622)



UPDATE !

Michael Hastings Dead at 33 | Politics News | Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michael-hastings-rolling-stone-contributor-dead-at-33-20130618)
Michael Hastings, the fearless journalist whose reporting brought down the career of General Stanley McChrystal, has died in a car accident in Los Angeles, Rolling Stone has learned. He was 33.


Hastings' unvarnished 2010 profile of McChrystal in the pages of Rolling Stone, "The Runaway General (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway-general-20100622)," captured the then-supreme commander of the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan openly mocking his civilian commanders in the White House.

What is more important ,your sig or the news item ,its just that your sig is much bigger

[MAGNES]

What is more important ,your sig or the news item ,its just that your sig is much bigger


Covering for your dirty 3 sock 6 sock troll friends on here is more important to you.

People that diluted and forum slided good threads and info from day one on here.

Remember, this thread was brought to you by " magnes is a troll " , ROFL !

You will never see the usual suspects ever bump a good thread, build a good
thread, out the Jews, Serpo is allied with these people, Serpo does not even
know who Panetta and Petraeus are, and he has something to say in this thread. LOL !

Contrast, my threads and posts full of links and sources with theirs.

Total black and white comparison.

We are trolled for outing the Jews, the Jews have trolls on here,
Jew trolls and their lackeys.

[Cebu_4_2]

I am not trolled... I feel left out. :(

[Serpo]

quote...You will never see the usual suspects ever bump a good thread, build a good
thread, out the Jews, Serpo is allied with these people.





Really.....................I thought the only reason you come here was to try and destroy this forum...............who am allied with again ,oh yea the usual suspects

[MAGNES]

Really.....................I thought the only reason you come here was to try and destroy this forum...............who am allied with again ,oh yea the usual suspects

Go post some more crap on here about aliens, the only thing you do is copy and paste,
half of it is trash.

You have no real understanding of anything.

YOU DO NOT READ, not what is on this forum, nor anything that matters.

You have no clue who the NeoCons are, neither do your Jew troll friends on here.


Dont know this guy very well but after seeing him talk the other day I can understand why they dont want any guns around............he seemed very shifty to me........

You don't even know who key people are, no wonder you cover for trolls that destroyed this place.

Page one looks like shit because of people like you.

http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?59635-HAHA-Marines-asked-to-disarm-before-Panetta-speech&p=524759&viewfull=1#post524759


CIA DIRECTOR PANETTA

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

CLINTON WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF

NEOCON POINT MAN

http://online.wsj.com/media/Panetta_CIA_P_20090219171346.jpg

Twin brother of Petraeus.

All these Jew NeoCons are interchangeable order takers which
is why they are easy to move around.

LYING CIA's Panetta: Iran has enough uranium for 2 bombs (http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?30711-LYING-CIA-s-Panetta-Iran-has-enough-uranium-for-2-bombs)

important announcement by Obama very soon, 1st May 2011
http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?48313-important-announcement-by-Obama-very-soon-tonight-after-10pm&p=407904&viewfull=1#post407904

Petraeus replacing the old fraud Panetta
So this fraud is going to run the C.I.A. (http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?50940-So-this-fraud-is-going-to-run-the-C.I.A.)


Everything we post here on War, " war on terror ", " colored revolutions ",
it's all Panetta, one of the first things Panetta did was clean up for Bush,
then perpetuate PNAC under Obama. He is one of Clinton NeoCons.
He may even be Mega competing with Rahm Emanual for that title.




THE POSERS HAVE TAKEN OVER !

I'll bump my threads with their quotes, it will be comedy hour, total contrast.

[Serpo]

Go post some more crap on here about aliens, the only thing you do is copy and paste, half of it is trash.

You have no real understanding of anything.



You don't even know who key people are, no wonder you cover for trolls that destroyed this place.

Page one looks like shit because of people like you.

http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?59635-HAHA-Marines-asked-to-disarm-before-Panetta-speech&p=524759&viewfull=1#post524759

Im from Australia you moron , Im supposed to know everything that happens in USA ,idiot.

Whats the prime ministers name of Australia ,whats the defense secretary name .

With all the info you have kept and stored its obvious too many you are an agent batting for the other side.

[gunDriller]

I dreamt/had this early morning vision right after waking up, that the real reason for General McChrystals stepdown was that very soon the war on Iran will begin. Which Petreus will be held responsible to in terms of it's success. When/if it backfires McChrystal will be asked to step in and save the situation. At this point they only want one reliable person to be in charge when the attack on Iran begins, and it is only weeks away... McChrystal can later claim that the only reason for this article and his resignation was the warplans, but because of his loyalty to the president, he decided to do something that appeared to be professional suicide, rather than spill the beans about the plans...

fvck, that's quite a dream. i'm glad i don't dream about political stuff, it would be like a nightmare !

the US gov. is like a shark's teeth, always a replacement or 5 for the spot in front of the camera.

like this mako

http://www.kazak.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Maco_Shark_Teeth.jpg

not sure about shark fruit salad though :)

http://cdn.smosh.com/sites/default/files/bloguploads/shark-week-2.jpg

[Neuro]

Obviously I was wrong on that dream, but I can't even remember I had it. Three years ago, and still no war on Iran. What does McChrystal do nowadays?

[mick silver]

..this is what happens BEFORE military takeovers......jus sayin.
i was thinking the same thing , but i could be wrong . just look at how they wanted to take away the guns from troops that are at home now

[Hitch]

Im from Australia you moron , Im supposed to know everything that happens in USA ,idiot.

Well, now you've done it, Serpo. Welcome to Magnes's ever growing shit list. You'll now be trolled by that maniac forever, actually, on the board.

The forum was a peaceful place, then Magnes shows up like the Kraken unleashed. To stir up drama on all us little posters. Because, you know, online forums revolve around him.

The guy is a madman, a complete lunatic.

If you keep at it maybe you'll achieve a spot in his sig line....

[gunDriller]

Obviously I was wrong on that dream, but I can't even remember I had it. Three years ago, and still no war on Iran. What does McChrystal do nowadays?

besides pick his nose when nobody's looking ?

maybe he 'picks & flicks' - and pretends it's a bunker-buster going down.