The Operators

News is nothing but words,

and you can never really tell if words are news

--Jose Saramago
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A Ranger reader suggested Michael Hasting's book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan," about the "relief for cause" of 4-Star General Stanley McChrystal; to McChrystal acolytes, Hasting did a hatchet job on the General.

What Hastings does well is to represent the chasm between McChrystal's cadre and the average citizen: "McChrystal appears to represent a new kind of military elite, a member of a warrior class that has lost touch with the civilian world" (74), and "The American public -- with an overwhelming apathy -- had lost touch with the military, too "(75).

That is Hasting's take-home message: The civilian leadership and the civilians themselves are divorced from the military, all viewing matters through different lenses. The one consistent between the political and military elite is a certain hubris not rooted in reality, couched behind The Story. McChrystal is spun as a one-meal-a-day Spartan who runs 12 miles before breakfast, but here he is living high off the hog in posh Paris digs; why wasn't he and his entourage billeted in NATO transitional quarters, more in keeping with the spin?

It seems few are free from that arrogance and sense of entitlement -- witness events like the recent Secret Service prostitution scandal or the the Government Accountability Office (GAO) behaving not so accountably in Las Vegas. Such an old story: Done in by hubris.

How do guys like McChrystal get promoted to the O-10 strata? How do they make even General Officer -- what is the cut? If he is as represented in this book, it would be wise to scrap West Point and rely upon Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) to train our officer cadre.

A redefinition of success and leadership is called for.

Bad Faith

You either got faith or you got unbelief
and there ain't no neutral ground
--Precious Angel, Bob Dylan

We sing about beauty and we sing about truth
At ten thousand dollars a show
--On the Cover of the Rolling Stone,
Dr. Hook

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men
--The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

Do or do not -- there is no try
--Yoda, Star Wars
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Friend Publius recently commented that recently demobbed General Stanley McChrystal, he of Rolling Stone infamy, may have unconsciously wished to be relieved of command.

So: What if McChrystal DID unconsciously engineer his dismissal due to the stress and internal confusion caused by executing an immoral, illegal and pointless war? What if his conscience is in revolt?

What if General Petraeus passed out while testifying in congressional hearings fainted because his conscious mind is rebelling against his subconscious knowledge that he is a hollow man laden with meaningless medals that signify naught. What if his mind just shut down from the psychic overload of the reality versus the lies?

What if the famous West Point Honor Code crept into his brain and overwhelmed his imposed and constructed beliefs? There is a place where reality (truth) and lies intersect, and this place is psychosis.

What if the U.S. currently resides in a state of national psychosis? What are the current wars if not a manifestation of collective psychosis -- wars which defy rational thought and will never achieve anything of merit?

What if logic and clarity of thought are no longer a leadership requisite? What if our leaders and their re-election reflect nothing so much as our ignorance and mass hysteria? What if we have approached an episode of national schizophrenia, sometimes defined as stimulus overload?

When is too much? We are on a treadmill of input, trying to filter out the extraneous or downright lies, but the feed never stops. News programs assault us with pugnacious opinionators, while dissonant feeds scroll across the bottom of the page. It is like some horrific dystopian world in which words are our SOMA.

When the psyche is overloaded, the organism enters a state of struggle for definition. It rarely heals without a period of rest and/or intervention. It does not look like the media onslaught will abate anytime soon.

As a nation, we are a bunch of re-actors. We vote to the swing of the pendulum, in anger and without much deliberation. Logic and orderliness of thought does not seem to be the order of the day. We prefer the antipodes, but cannot decide which reflects our best national interests.

The U.S. is a nation in opposition to itself and its national values, or what we thought were our core values. The decisions of our Supreme Court reflect this ambivalence. Engineers of state torture -- Bybee, Yoo and Addington -- were recently cleared of charges because they believed in the righteousness of their decisions. And so passioneering takes the torch from disinterested rationale.

What if we are so morally bankrupt that we have actually adopted a Warrior Code, and war has become our national identity?

We are acting from Sartre's mauvaise foi (bad faith). For the world's freest nation, saying "You made us do this" is poor form. "You won't you let me (be a democratic nation; honor our civil rights, etc. . . .)" -- is the cry of spoiled child. We do or we don't, we are or we aren't.

Perhaps the Generals know this, and their innards are staging an externally-witnessed revolt.

--Jim & Lisa

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Run, Forrest, Run

Paresh Nath (UAE)

Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun
--Army of Darkness (1992)

The race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong
--Ecclesiastes, 9:11

Mama says they was magic shoes.
They could take me anywhere
--Forrest Gump (1994)
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By all MSM reports, General Stanley A. McChrystal is the Man With a Plan (instead of the hired assassin he actually is.)

Most press indicates the war in Afghanistan is reverting to Square One, and we will now kick ass and take names. No more of the screw up it has actually become. Been there, done that. General McChrystal will be the New Spartan Messiah, a savior ushering in that smell of victory.

The warm and fuzzy McChrystal stories invariably note that the General runs 10 miles before he begins each busy day, spreading democracy like Neufchatel on toast. (Not too thick, mind, or Afghanistan couldn't propagate the stifling Sharia snatch-and-catch marriage laws perpetuated by U.S. tax dollars.)

But why is the running even mentioned? We had a Joggin' President in Bush, and that didn't seem to help matters much. (As an aside, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked on NPR what she would title Bush's autobiography, to which she answered without a blink, "Exercise, Exercise, Exercise.")

Could Generals Washington, Knox, Scott, Lee, Grant, Pershing, Eisenhower, Patton, Creighton Abrams or Powell run even half a mile? When did jogging ability equate with the fitness of a Theatre Army level Commander?

Ranger wonders if any of the Taliban leaders ever jog, or can even run a mile. Even so, they can hump their gear and traverse their terrain as their wars with the Greeks, British, Russians and Americans clearly indicate.

General McChrystal can run like Forrest Gump, but that is not going to alter the outcome of the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) in Afghanistan. The Taliban leaders are going to persist a lot longer than Runnin' McChrystal. It is not the hare that wins the UW/GW war, but rather, the turtle.

Physicality is not the measure of how one wins wars. Advertising campaigns keep us thinking that the Army of One and the "General-Corporal" idea will keep us Army Strong. It was with General David Petraeus that the idea of physical fitness = success was first pressed upon us.

The Rangers and Special Forces may be able to march 40 miles with a ruck and full battle rattle, with minimum rest breaks. But the Vietcong were skinny little malnourished, malaria-ridden fighters, and they held their own.

Just ask Generals Washington, Sam Houston or Giap. Even Mao Zedong, to keep the spirit of Counterinsurgency thinking alive.