McChrystalizing hogwash

This was not a good sign.

On Sunday, CNN's John King asked President Obama: "Our Pentagon correspondent ... has been told that General McChrystal has finished his report and his recommendation to you, but he has been told, 'Don't call us; we'll call you. Hold it.' Are you or someone working for you asking him to sit on that at the moment because of the dicey politics of this?"

To which Obama gave a winding, modern-Afghanistan-survey-course, 389-word answer, which I have reduced here to a mere 138:

No, no, no, no.... [W]hat we said was, let's do a soup-to-nuts re-evaluation, focusing on what our original goal was.... What I also said was, we've got an election coming up.... [A]fter the election's over, we've got to review it.... We are in the process of working through that strategy. The only thing I've said to my folks is, A, I want an unvarnished assessment, but, B, I don't want to put the resource question before the strategy question.... And once I have that clarity from the commanders on the ground, Secretary Gates, my national security adviser, Jim Jones, and others, when we have clarity on that, then the question is, OK, how do we resource it? And what I will say to the American public is not going to be driven by the politics of the moment.

Wash, rinse, spin. Or -- Afghanistan, The Early Years: The Making of the Pentagon Papers, Version II.

King asked not what Obama would do for his country and say to the American people when all was said and done, McChrystalwise. He asked if McChrystal's recommendation was being held up; he (we) received a quadruply emphatic No.

Hours later, through a Pentagon leak, we learned from the Washington Post's Bob Woodward that McChrystal's "assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team" -- yet "defense officials have said he is awaiting instructions before sending [his recommendations] to the Pentagon."

OK, somebody's fibbing -- granted, it's an artful fib, denying the politics of it but not the hold? -- and that's no way to escalate a war.

Now, no one would have expected Obama to have candidly told King, You bet, John, there are indeed some dicey politics whirling around this issue at the moment, not only in the ghastly hellhole of Congress, where my friends are my enemies and my enemies are my friends, but in that ghastlier hellhole of Afghanistan, too, assuming its current government -- ha! -- hasn't by now robbed it right off the map.

Still, Obama could have bluntly conceded that, Yes, McChrystal's overall assessment is in, to the White House, and naturally its every possible angle will be examined. Stay tuned.

Instead, through omissions of fact, Obama obfuscated the chronology of apparent intent -- or at least he seemed to obfuscate the chronology, and there is apparent intent.

It's in this tangle that I get lost. The consideration of any firm strategic assessment would be contingent upon the availability and execution of resources -- of tactics and logistics -- just as any detailed tactical construct would be contingent upon a comfortable assumption of strategy. No? In short, why go to the trouble of -- why go this far with -- one without the other?

OK, so I'm no West Point graduate and I'm out of my league here. That I freely confess. But scheming has an unmistakable odor. It's hard to miss, especially when appearances so eagerly proffered tend not so much to outright conflict as to idiosyncratically shift with subsequently revealed facts.

And have you read the first set of those facts, which is to say, McChrystal's assessment as reported by Woodward? It reads less like a military report than a Gothic horror story -- replete with "insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality," as the good general put it.

Months ago, during Obama's presidential infancy, the NY Times' Frank Rich took a look at various White House appointments and expressed particular concern over the materializing economic team, crowded as it was with colossally mistaken forecasters and Wall Street insiders. I recall thinking at the time, however, that those boys worried me far less -- since they were now in a position of having to make good, so to speak -- than Obama's embryonic national-security team. That, I thought then, and believe now, is the crew that will make or break Obama's presidency; they appeared too conventionally hard-power oriented (although, thankfully, there are internal divisions, as the Post reports this morning).

Oddly enough, I don't believe Obama is playing sinister politics with Afghanistan. I do believe he genuinely wants to do the right thing, whatever that is, even though the domestic politics of it may suggest a rather rapid withdrawal. But, like Jack Kennedy, he's young and inexperienced and likely somewhat in awe of bemedaled uniforms and shiny brass.

Kennedy mostly got over that -- and rather quickly -- because he first listened to them. Here's to Obama's shortcut to history.