Today's Stories

September 29, 2009

Marshall Auerback
A Neoliberal Hijacking

Alan Farago
Recovery Without Feeling

Jonathan Cook
Palestinians in the Israeli Army

Bouthaina Shaaban
Arabs in the International Balance

September 28, 2009

Laura Carlsen
The Sound and Fury of the Honduran Coup

Anthony DiMaggio
The U.S., Iran and Nuclear Terror

Paul Craig Roberts
More Lies, More Deceptions

Neve Gordon
On Palestinian Civil Disobedience

Bill Quigley
Street Report From the G20

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's LBJ Moment

Nicola Nasser
Stuck Between Two Failures

Ben Rosenfeld Murder in New Orleans: Remembering Kirsten Brydum

Website of the Day
The Short March

September 25-7, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ruin of His Presidency

Daniel Wolff
Speculating on Education

Rev. William E. Alberts
How "White Magic" Makes the Ism of Race Disappear

Mike Roselle
Send Lawyers, Guns and Money

Saul Landau
Covert Memories From Miami

Eshan Azari
Why Afghan Intellectuals Live in National Despair

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Pentagon Feedlot

Robert Jensen
Is Obama a Socialist?

Jonathan Cook
Sleeping with the Enemy

Nelson P Valdés
Cuba, Hurricanes and the Internet

David Michael Green
Dumping Dubya

Ramzy Baroud
The Goldstone Report and Israeli Impunity

John V. Whitbeck
The Partition Straightjacket

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trial Delayed ... Again

David Ker Thomson
The Lady Vanishes

Seth Sandronsky
Obama and Race Management

Jim Goodman
Why are Farmers Afraid of Michael Pollen?

Charles R. Larson
From Oppression to Opportunity

David Yearsley
Froberger's Travels

Kim Nicolini
Hardcore Capitalism

Lorenzo Wolff
Transparent Pink

Website of the Weekend
An Emergency Appeal in the Fight Against Big Coal

September 24, 2009

Steven Higgs
Even in Indiana, Doctors Support National Health Insurance

Christopher Brauchli
Death Pays

Marshall Auerback
The Shortfall at the FDIC

Stephanie Westbrook
Italy's Fallen Soldiers

Nadia Hijab
Know Your Dictator

Sen. Russell Feingold
Fixing the Patriot Act, Restoring the Constitution

David Macaray
Goodbye "Norma Rae"

Binoy Kampmark
Curry Bashings in Oz

Joe Allen
Dancing With the Hammer

Website of the Day
The Most Corrupt Members of Congress

September 23, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Economy is a Lie, Too

Gabriel Kolko
The United States in Afghanistan: Eight Years Later

Uri Avnery
The Waldorf-Astoria Summit

Shamus Cooke
The First Shots of the Trade War

Missy Beattie
The Sound of Money

Gareth Porter
Taliban Rising

Mark Weisbrot
How Much Repression Will Hillary Clinton Support in Honduras?

Dr. Susan Block
The Murder of Annie Le

Norm Kent
Pot and the Right to Pursue Happiness

Richard Neville
Apocalypse Porno

Website of the Day
In Carver Country

September 22, 2009

Franklin C. Spinney The Huge Hole in Gen. McChrystal's Afghan Counterinsurgency Strategy

Russell Mokhiber
Who's the Pimp?

Greg Grandin
Zelaya's Brazilian Gambit

Nikolas Kozloff
Salvaging Democracy in Honduras Will Be Tricky

John Ross
Mexico Convulsed by Paranoia

Ron Jacobs
Gen. McChrystal's Salespitch

Tariq Ali
The Afghan Folly

Dave Lindorff
NYT Trashes Single-Payer

Harvey Wasserman
Tom Friedman's Idiocy Atomique

Vijay Prashad
Is Anything Better Than Nothing?

Kareem Shora
After the CIA Torture Report

Website of the Day
Did a State Dept Official Sell Nuclear Secrets?

September 21, 2009

JoAnn Wypijewski
Will Trumka or the Steelworkers Push Labor Into Battle?

Carl Finamore
Backstage at the AFL-CIO Convention

Uri Avnery
Sliming Goldstone and His Report

Nikolas Kozloff
Joe Wilson's Immigration Hypocrisy

Paul Simpson, M.D.
Why Your Doctor May Have PTSD

Alan Nasser
New Deal Liberalism Writes Its Obituary

Ray McGovern
CIA Torturers Running Scared

Dave Lindorff
Thoughts on Saving an Old Barn

Lina Thorne
Women, War and Afghanistan

Jeb Sprague
Confronting the G20

Website of the Day
Petition: Save the Yellowstone Grizzly

September 18-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
When Gossip Came Back and Our Modern Age was Born

Russell Mokhiber
Meet the Real Death Panels

Mike Whitney
The Post-Bubble Malaise

David Michael Green
Can America be Salvaged?

Jonathan Cook
Boycott Derails Jerusalem Rail Line

Nadia Hijab
Sinking the Goldstone Report

Mark Weisbrot
Recession, Recovery and Reform: Will Anything Change?

Michael Winship
Let's Make a Deal, Beltway Edition

Michael Leonardi
The Nuclear Dump in the Mediterranean Sea

Andy Worthington
The Kuwaiti Who Met Bin Laden

Fred Gardner
The Prohibitionists' Manifesto

David Macaray
What Happens in Congress Stays in Congress

David Rosen
System Failure and the Garrido Case

Jason Mark
Hacking the Sky

Mike Ferner
In Praise of Senator Baucus

Farzana Versey
The Great Indian Rope Trick

Ron Jacobs
Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Faustus: an Interview with Marc Estrin

elin o'Hara slavick
Flags for Hiroshima: Artist's Statement

Gilad Aztmon
Vengeance, Barbarism and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

David Yearsley
Mendelssohn as Organ Maestro

Charles R. Larson
Darkness, Dignity and Hope in Liberia

Lorenzo Wolff
Dialing Up The Clash

Website of the Weekend
Meet Your Conservative Movement

September 17, 2009

Joshua Frank
Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

Brenda Norrell
Cry Me a River: Uranium and Genocide in Indian Country

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis, One Year Later

Pam Martens
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

Franklin Lamb
Palestinian Camps Are Ready to Erupt

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: An Insult to Humanity

Jed Bickman
Drone War Over Pakistan

Alan Farago
The Mayor of Coconut Creek Gets Butterflies

Website of the Day
C.R.O.C.

September 16, 2009

Ray McGovern
Torture and Accountability

Stephen Green
America's Strange Health Care Debate

Andy Worthington
Is Bagram Obama's New Secret Prison?

Dean Baker
Short Sellers: the Unsung Heroes of the Financial Crisis

Anthony DiMaggio
Killing the Messenger

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: The Unheard Call

Benjamin Dangl
Justice Follows Direct Action

Robin Willoughby
The World Seed Conference: Good for Farmers?

Eric Walberg
EuroPeace, the Sounds of Silence

James Ridgeway
Bring That "Boy" Down

Website of the Day
Baucus' Bogus Bill

September 15, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of Lehman's Fall

Mutadhar al-Zaidi
The Story of My Shoe

Marshall Auerback
Government Spending is the Solution--Not the Problem

Afshin Rattansi
The Deal That Led to the Srebrenica Massacre: Former UN Spokeswoman Fingers Holbrooke and the Clinton Administration

Jonathan Cook
How US Tax Breaks Fund Israeli Settlers

Gareth Porter:
Niger Redux? IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Nuke Docs Were Forged

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs More Catcalls

Winslow T. Wheeler
Obama and Pentagon Pork

Franklin Spinney
Bin Laden's Latest Message and the Nuttiness of the War on Terror

Karen Korenoski /
Michael Yates
Up in Wood Smoke: Boulder's Dirty Little Secret

David Macaray
Government Cheese

Susie Day
President Mao-bama's Little Red Primer

Website of the Day
The Cotton Pickin' Truth: the Persistance of Slavery in Mississippi

September 14, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Health Care Deceit

M. G. Piety
The Danes Do It (Health Care) Better

Shamus Cooke
Wall Street Under Obama: Bigger and Riskier

Bouthaina Shaaban
Three Faces and a Homeland

Alvaro Huerta
In Defense of the Undocumented: Immigrants and Health Care

John Ross
Mexico Loses Its History

Harvey Wasserman
The Supreme Court and Corporate Money

Adam Federman
The Plight of the Bumblebee

Stephen Fleischman
The Federal Twist

Robert Jensen
Can Journalism Schools be Relevant in a World on the Brink?

Website of the Day
The Origin of Sex Offender Registries

September 11-13, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Big Speech: Math Trumps Rhetoric

JoAnn Wypijewski
Trumka Takes Over AFL-CIO

Carl Ginsburg
The Patient as Profit Center

Leonard Peltier
I am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now

Franklin Lamb
Ted Kennedy's Changing Take on Israel

Benjamin Dangl
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies

Mike Whitney
How to Fight Deflation

John Berger
In Search of Antonello

Saul Landau
Watergate and Modern Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Disgraceful Democrats

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Pryor's Judgment

Felice Pace
NPR's Linda Gradstein Has Done It Again on Gaza

Jordan Flaherty
The Battle Over Discriminatory Housing Laws in New Orleans

Ron Jacobs
It's Time to be Impolite About Afghanistan

David Macaray
The Utility of Boycotts

David Correia
Welcome to the Business-Friendly Carpenter's Union

Robert Bryce
Wind Turbines and Bird Kills

Christopher Brauchli
Defenders of the Classroom

Paul Krassner
Aha! A Few Words About the 9/11 Truth Movement

Charles R. Larson
Deracination

Kim Nicolini
"Extract:" An Exercise in Economic Realism

David Yearsley
Tall Buildings: the Sound and the Silence

Lorenzo Wolff
In Defense of the One Hit Wonder

Poets' Basement
McEnteer and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Pizarchik: the Wrong Choice

September 10, 2009

Joshua Frank
Inside Hanford's B Reactor: a Tour of the World's Most Toxic Nuclear Site

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Bad Money

Brian M. Downing
The State of U.S. National Security

Franklin C. Spinney
Portrait of an Afghan Firefight: Up Close and Personal

Andy Worthington
No Escape From Guantánamo

Chase Madar
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Farzana Versey
A Tale of Two Slums

Ronnie Cummins
Whole Foods, Fair Trade and Organics

Binoy Kampmark
Health Care, Obama and the System

Timothy Lebrón
The Conservative Case for Health Care Reform

Charles R. Larson
A Solution to the Health Care Dilemma

Website of the Day
The Debtor's Revolt Begins!

September 9, 2009

Richard Neville
Trigger-Happy in Afghanistan

Melissa Checker
Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses

Nadia Hijab
Settling for ... Settlements?

Robert Weissman
The Stakes at the Supreme Court

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike

Russell Mokhiber
Pollan, Mackey, Whole Foods and Single Payer

James Ridgeway
The Dotty Factor: Will Demented Geezers Wreck the Economy?

Richard W. Behan
Obama's Imperative in Afghanistan

James McEnteer
The Photo and the Secretary: How to Appall Robert Gates

Martha Rosenberg
Hatchery Horrors

Website of the Day
Belmondo Verité

September 8, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Accused of War Crimes Opposes Investigations

John Ross
Rituals of the Absurd

Jeff Leys
Health Care vs. Warfare: the Future of the Afghan War

Mike Whitney Ashcroft: Repugnant to the Constitution

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Empty Labor Day Speech

Ellen Brown
Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?

Norman Solomon Men With Guns: In Kabul and Washington

Deepak Tripathi
The Axis of Evil and the Great Satan

Laray Polk
Personality Cults, Indoctrination and Inculcation

Charles R. Larson
Just Who Does He Think He Is?

Website of the Day
The President is Not a Guidance Counselor

September 7, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Bouthaina Shaaban
In Praise of Admiral Mullen

David Macaray
Obama's Labor Day Report Card

Paul Craig Roberts
Indefensible Nation

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

Conn Hallinan
Brazil Flexes Its Muscles

Walter Brasch
The Origins of Labor Day, the Unknown Holiday

Mark Weisbrot
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

Carl Finamore
China's Birthday Stimulation

C. G. Estabrook
Advance Text of Obama's Big Speech

Website of the Day
One Down, 20,000 to Go

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

Anthony Papa
Why Leslie Crocker Snyder Should Not Become New York City's New DA

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Lee Sustar /
S. Sepehri
The Fallout From Iran's Elections

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

Helen Redmond
The Lion Sleeps Tonight: the Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

Charles R. Larson
Mandanipour's Masterpiece: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Mark Scaramella
Ho-Bleeping-Hum: a Few Well-Chosen Words About Valerie Plame's Book

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

Ben Sonnenberg
Hooking, Breaking Friendships, Cross-Dressing and, Above All, Delphine Seyrig

Poets' Basement
Davies, Orloski and Bready

Website of the Weekend
Architectural Semiotics with Glenn Beck

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

September 29, 2009

McChrystal's Infomercial

60 Minutes and the General

By BRUCE JACKSON

David Martin’s 13-minute “60 Minutes” interview with General Stanley McChrystal (September 27), the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, may have seemed like one more of those insufferable Sunday evening puff pieces, like Steve Kroft’s strokejob with Clarence Thomas in September 2007 and Morley Safer’s with Bobby Jindahl in March 2009. As in the Kroft and Safer interviews, Martin never asked a question that went faster than slowball and he spent the whole time playing hagiographer and straight-man. He never asked one significant follow-up question. If he’d been a flack for DoD editing this piece in the Pentagon studio he couldn’t have done a better job.

But the interview was more than just another “60 Minutes” puff piece. Four-star battlefront generals don’t put on dog-and-pony shows for reporters without a very good reason for doing so, and he put on a very fancy show for Martin, with stops at his room, his office, his briefing room, trips in his helicopter and SUV, and much more. It’s difficult to imagine that McChrystal’s reason was anything other than putting pressure on the Obama administration to give him the series of very large troop increases he thinks he needs to win his war.

McChrystal makes the Westmoreland argument for more American troops, and Martin doesn’t seem remember we’ve heard all this before. The words “Viet Nam” were never uttered once in the interview by either man, even though you could go through it and substitute “Viet Nam” for “Afghanistan” and again and again (if you’re old enough) you’d say, “But I heard exactly these lines before.” Yes, you did.

At 55, McChrystal is five years older than Westmoreland was when he took over as military commander in Viet Nam. He’s also better educated. If McChrystal doesn’t talk about the past it’s because he chooses to leave it where it is, not because he isn’t aware of it. He went to West Point, has an MA from the Naval War College and an MS in international relations from Salve Regina University; he spent a year at the Kennedy School of Government and another at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before his current assignment he was perhaps best known for two things: announcing at one of his regular 2003 Pentagon press briefings on the progress of the Iraq war, ‘I could anticipate that the major combat engagements are over,” and for heading the unit that found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarquai, Task Force 6-26. That unit was notorious for its frequent use of torture in interrogations. McChrystal was also involved in the cover up of the Pat Tillman friendly fire incident.

Martin addresses none of that. He mentions the killing of al-Zaquari (but not the torture), only as part of a riff on how brave a warrior McChrystal is.

Martin and McChrystal look more than a little bit alike. They both have long skinny faces. Sometimes when the camera cut back and forth from one to the other it seemed like the same actor, tricked up to look like two different people. Martin has a grey crew cut and wears glasses; McChrystal has very short combed down brown hair, no glasses except when he’s looking at a map and, maybe when no cameras are around. Martin is kind of moony and dour, while McChrystal is all quick moves, no qualifiers in his speech, a guy looks you right in the eye.

In his intro, Martin tells us that a man who must be “America’s most battle-hardened general” says “there must be a change in the way we operate.” Later he tells us that the general is intrepid (when he meets with local officials who aren’t wearing body armor he doesn’t wear body armor either), athletic, and that, “as he races against the calendar” he is a “one of a kind commander.”

“It’s hard to keep pace with McChrystal as he races through his marathon day,” gushes Martin. “He eats one meal a day. Anything more makes him feel sluggish. In another life he could have been a monk.” The general shows Martin what seems to be his living quarters: a single room, sparsely furnished.

“What you’re about to hear is as closed to an unvarnished war briefing as you’re likely to get,” Martin tells us. I think he was trying to convey the idea that the general is going to be telling it like it is, directly and with no waffling or fudging. But that’s not what a war briefing is (nor is it what the general delivers). A war briefing for the staff is the CO standing in front of the room, running the show, and letting get said only what he thinks ought to get said, while the underlings keep their place and speak when spoken to. If it’s for the press, it’s smoke and mirrors. (Remember the reports of the “Doha follies” in Gulf War I? The military would have press briefings every day, then everybody would look at Al Jazeera to find out what was really going on.) Martin doesn’t seem to remember that “war briefings” are strategic events, not teaching seminars.

McChrystal poses at his desk, flipping through pages in a red binder marked “secret.” But, Martin says, he doesn’t trust that to tell him what’s going on, so three times each week he gets on a helicopter to see for himself.”

Then he tells us, “Flying over terrain that has defeated invaders from the British to the Soviets, McChrystal knows he has to do more than just fine-tune the strategy that after eight years of war appears on the brink of failure.” Martin, who was an English major at Yale and who is CBS News’ national security correspondent, should do better than that. The Brits were newcomers to Afghanistan: they didn’t get there until 1836. Outsiders started getting whipped by the fractious Afghanistan tribes at least as early as Alexander the Great in 330 BC. The place has never been colonized and none of the great armies got to stay as long as they would have liked or went home with as many soldiers as they’d brought.

We see Martin and McChrystal side by side in a helicopter, then side by side in the back seat of a SUV. The guys in front wear helmets and body armor. McChrystal never, in the segment, wears body armor or carries a firearm. One time, in a market, he even makes the troops guarding him move back out of camera range. “The greatest risk we can accept,” McChrystal says in the SUV, “is to lose support of the people here. If the people are against us, we cannot be successful.” Conventional war, Martin says, paraphrasing McChrystal, and once again missing an opportunity to ask him about torture as a weapon of war, “can never win this war…. In other words, for much of the past eight years, the US has been sowing the seeds of its own demise.”

Sound familiar? How about LBJ forty years ago, telling us the technique we’ll use to win the war in Viet Nam: “The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who live there.”

In order to do his job, McChrystal “relentlessly pounded away at the Pentagon bureaucracy,” desk-jockeys who move too slowly and decide too late. How many times did General William Westmoreland kvetch about the desk jockeys back in D.C. and how they slowed him down?

McChrystal is not only a good commander in the field; he is also acutely tuned to image management on the base. The U.S. military HQ used to drop its flags to half-mast every time an American or soldier fighting with the Americans were killed. He stopped that. He had two reasons. One, they were having flags “at half-mast all the time, and two, it meant they were looking back rather than ahead…We’d gotten to a point where the flags were flying at half-mast all the time and I believe that a force that’s fighting a war can’t spend all its time looking back at what the costs have been, they’ve got to look ahead and they’ve got to have their confidence. And I thought it was important that the flags be up where they belong.”

If you look ahead and don’t look back, how do you learn anything? You’re doomed to make it up as you go, and to make the same mistakes every one of those generals since Alexander made. No wonder neither of these guys mentioned Viet Nam. If the mounting number of casualties in Afghanistan would be depressing and bring the costs of this sort of adventure to mind, what would remembering Viet Nam do to morale? Keep the flags at the top of the masts: it’s a piece with the Bush administration’s ukase against photographing returning U.S. war dead. If you don’t see it you won’t know it and if you don’t know it you won’t be depressed by it. (Do you hear Bob Dylan singing, “ “Shut the eyes of the dead not to embarrass anyone?”)

Then Martin delivers what for McChrystal is the money shot of the entire interview. After this unquestioning advertisement for the intrepid Spartan who doesn’t even wear eyeglasses except when he’s looking at a map, and over an image of troops in the field, Martin says, “McChrystal is hostage to geography. Afghanistan is bigger than Iraq, yet he has only half as many troops. He plans to double the size of Afghan forces to 400,000, but that will take years. The only place he can get the troops he needs now is from the United States.”

More troops is what McChrystal wants, he wants them now, and this infomercial on “60 Minutes” is a key element in his campaign to get them.

On August 30, a month before the “60 Minutes” segment aired, McChrystal sent Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates a confidential 66-page report on the Afghanistan situation, “Commander’s Initial Assessment”. That report was soon leaked to the Washington Post and reported on by Bob Woodward (“McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure,” 21 September).

In it, McChrystal wrote: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) while Afghan security capacity matures risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible…. Success is achievable, but it will not be attained simply by trying harder or ‘doubling down’ on the previous strategy. Additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we thinking and operate…. Our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population.”

“Resources will not win this war,” McChrystal wrote, “but under-resourcing could lose it.” Which suggests that at the key lesson he learned from Westmoreland in Vietnam was not to stay or get out of wars you can’t win, but make sure that when it’s over you can put the blame on the politicians, and to get your line out before they have a chance to get to no.

Who do you think leaked the confidential 66-page memorandum to Bob Woodward? Perhaps someone in the Obama administration, but that is not known as a leaky administration and Obama’s staff had no reason to do it and several good reasons not to, one of which is that it helps the Pentagon put additional public pressure on them at a time when they’re trying to find a way out of what is rapidly becoming a quagmire. Iraq, a war Stanley McChrystal told us was pretty much over seven years ago, is a training exercise compared to the difficulties we face in Afghanistan.

McChrystal’s confidential report went public in the Post one week before the “60 Minutes” segment.

After the report was leaked and Woodward wrote about it, Obama announced that he wants a full-scale reevaluation of the Afghanistan war. Joe Biden has been consistent in arguing for a drawdown of U.S. forces there. McChrystal was, several sources said, told not to make any requests for more troops until that reevaluation was completed.

The general must have decided that was a suggestion rather than a direct order, because last week he flew to Germany to hand-deliver to the head of the Joint Chiefs a request for 45,000 more troops, which would bring the U.S. force there to 113,000. That was two days before the “60 Minutes” segment telling us what a perfect general he is aired.

McChrystal is an impressive commander. He makes a good argument for more troops, and he works the press brilliantly. William Westmoreland was also an impressive commander. He also made a good argument for more troops. Up to a point, he got them. As it turned out, everyone would have been better off if LBJ had said no the first time the request was made.

There is a scene in the “60 Minutes” segment where we see McChrystal on his daily 5AM 60 minute jog around his compound. He wears t-shirt and shorts, and what seem to be earphones connected to an iPod. If he’s really listening to music and not battle reports, someone should program this device so it plays over and over again, at least until he stops running and says, “I get it,” four lines from the final stanza of Bob Dylan’s “Memphis Blues Again”:

An' here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice.

Bruce Jackson edits the web journal BuffaloReport.com. His most recent books ares The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Temple University Press) and Cummins Wide: Photographs from the Arkansas Penitentiary (Center for Documentary Studies and Center Working Papers).

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