"Fear and Loathing" in DC

McChrystal is out and in comes Petraeus at the plate. I applaud the move because I viewed McChrystal as self serving and Petraeus as one of the greatest thinking Generals of our era. This move could be dangerous for several military related and political reasons. So far the great hope of the future has not materialized as promised by the Obama administration. The kind of rogue behavior expressed by McChrystal was not confined as the sole opinion of a single General, his views are held to be true throughout most of the people I know still serving. I could not go to a National Guard weekend without hearing dissent openly expressed by troops against their boss, Barrack Obama. This would constantly drive me up an internal wall because during the Bush years, some Marine would have ripped my head off for saying what I thought about Bush, but I shut my mouth, because ultimately, my boss was George W. Bush. Today the command switch will be the topic of every Obama hating serviceperson in every corner of the globe. McChrystal was a right wing pawn, his dissent was a message, his resignation, I believe to be of his own volition and the military backlash for this action may be greater than anticipated.
The military is very conservative right wing, which I have always found strange because most of the people I served with came from working class backgrounds. If Obama is going to try and take back control of this machine, he has a long road ahead of him. The reason we are not united the way that the Obama administration had hoped for is because the left is full of sack-less politician and can never back up what they say. On the right, the politicians don’t budge. The right’s policy of shooting down every idea presented by the left keeps them strong, and I believe that the right must hold this position, that they will survive, because the left let the momentum die after the presidential election of Obama.
As for the war in Afghanistan, it could not be a better move to put the General in charge that coordinated the successful troop “surge” of Baghdad 2007. The problem is that Afghanistan is very different than Iraq, a troop surge will not be welcomed by the people of Afghanistan because they are not getting their heads cut off in scores by crooked cops, religious rivals, and Al Qaeda the way the Iraqi’s were in 2006-2007. A surge will be seen as an occupation and the second that American presence is accepted by the Afghan people as an occupation, we will wish we did something else. I believe the current strategy of containment is a poor one. If there is going to be any hope of stabilizing the country the military should focus on the Pakistan border and work backward through the country instead of from the South up. General Petraeus’ doctoral dissertation was titled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era”. Iraq was not Vietnam, but I believe that Afghanistan could be, if we do this wrong.