McChrystal's MoFos

Tapper reports that the general has conceded that he has "compromised the mission". That surely means he is out. When even Bill Kristol and Eliot Cohen have dropped him, it's curtains. Ambers, in his invaluable night-beat feature, writes this:

LOW BLOW: Avowed opponents of McChrystal are whispering about the DoD's inspector general's report on abuses at Camp Nama, which McChrystal oversaw as Commander in Chief of the Joint Special Operations Command. It hasn't been released.

Low blow? What we saw at Camp Nama was the same kind of towel-snapping, the rules-don't-apply-to-us arrogance among McChrystal's men that we see in the Rolling Stone fiasco. Except the result then was not political embarrassment but eager and unrestrained engagement in war crimes:

Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. 'Will [the Red Cross] ever be allowed in here?' And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and theĀ  Pentagon that there's no way that the Red Cross could get in: "they won't have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators." ...

McChrystal was always a wild card. From his cover-up of the Tillman death to his toleration of brutal torture in Iraq, he was enabled and supported by all of official Washington. It is not a "low blow" to note the consistent thread here. And it is surely understandable that McChrystal's men - who had pioneered the Ralph Peters macho kill-and-torture-first policy - found counter-insurgency so, well, gay.

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