Excerpts From Rolling Stone’s McChrystal Profile

As my colleague Dexter Filkins reports, “An angry President Obama summoned his top commander in Afghanistan to Washington on Tuesday after a magazine article portrayed the general and his staff as openly contemptuous of some senior members of the Obama administration.” The article that has reportedly enraged the president is “The Runaway General,” from an upcoming issue of Rolling Stone. Scanned copies of the article by Michael Hastings, a reporter who covered the war in Iraq for Newsweek and once worked for Gawker, were uploaded to the Web on Tuesday. Below are some of the more damaging excerpts. While Mr. Hastings was unlikely to have been responsible for the language the editors chose for the introduction to his article, the words that appear directly below its headline are unlikely to have gone down well in Mr. Obama’s office. The text reads: Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House. The article begins with an anecdote about General McChrystal’s complaining to an aide about having to attend a dinner with NATO Allies in Paris in April. “The dinner comes with the position, sir,” says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn. McChrystal turns sharply in his chair. “Hey, Charlie,” he asks, “does this come with the position?” McChrystal gives him the middle finger. […] “I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,” McChrystal says. He pauses a beat. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “no one in this room could do it.” While preparing to speak at the dinner, the general reportedly joked with an aide that if he was asked about Vice President Joe Biden’s thoughts on Afghan war strategy he might say, “Who’s that?” Mr. Hastings wrote that the aide had a different idea for a one-liner: “Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?” In one of the most damning passages, Mr. Hastings wrote: Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his [expletive] war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.” According to Mr. Hastings, the military team around the Pentagon’s top man in Afghanistan also resents the president’s national security adviser, James Jones, his envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, and two senior senators who were decorated for their service in Vietnam: One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a “clown” who remains “stuck in 1985.” Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, “turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it’s not very helpful.” Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal’s inner circle. “Hillary had Stan’s back during the strategic review,” says an adviser. “She said, ‘If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.’ McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. “The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal,” says a member of the general’s team. “Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous.” Andy Barr of Politico notes that the article was no surprise to General McChrystal: Rolling Stone’s executive editor on Tuesday said that Gen. Stanley McChrystal did not raise any objections to a new article that repeatedly quotes him criticizing the administration. Eric Bates, the magazine’s editor, said during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that McChrystal saw the piece prior to its publication as part of Rolling Stone’s standard fact-checking process — and that the general did not object to or dispute any of the reporting. Asked if McChrystal pushed back on the story, Bates responded: “No, absolutely not.”

source : http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/excerpts-from-rolling-stones-mcchrystal-profile/