In Which Obama Has A General Problem, Just Like A Real President*

Roggio at Long War points to and discusses a McClatchy report that McChrystal is ready to resign if not given the resources to prosecute the war in Afghanistan.

I’m going to guess Obama and Emanuel are not going to take kindly to being pressured, but it puts them in a spot.
They could always pre-emptively fire him, I suppose. But firing two generals who tell you that you need more, including the guy you hired to tell you how to do it with less, starts to look like a crisis. A grossly mishandled one. This is not exactly a Lincolnian crisis of generalship or a Truman-MacArthur one, either. Nor, contrary to all the Vietnam tooth-gnashing, is this LBJ and Westmoreland. It isn’t even a Bush wartime leadership crisis. Bush always played to win. He just needed to figure out how and find the right general for the job.

This one is all Obama. And it is not a crisis of generalship. It is a crisis of presidential leadership.

The tug-o-war playground politics of the matter aside, there is still the fact of war in Afghanistan, a persistent global threat, and the rapidly diminishing credibility of the United States as a stalwart, moral force in the world, from the limp handling of Iran to the delivery of tribute to Vladimir Putin, and now the dawdling and dithering over the erstwhile good war. For all their squawking about us, the Euros don’t need us to be another EU member. They need someone to do the dirty work. Ditto the Arabs. China and Russia have got to be enjoying this, though.

Totally related: Victor Davis Hanson at NRO looks at Two-Front Wars, Theirs and Ours and comes away with something other than the currently fashionable doom-and-gloom mongering. It’s al-Qaeda after eight years of war, on the ropes and desperate. I like the part about how al-Qaeda took their eye off the ball and committed resources to Iraq, to their detriment.

Anyway, think about it, Obama. History loves a warfighter who wins.

Commentary roundup at Memeorandum. In other war-related business, Malkin on the jihadi threat to America’s rail security. It’s about some guy named Najibullah Zazi. Afghan refugee, raised in Peshawar, naturalized American. It’s a small world after all!

* You know. One who recognizes that there are some things bigger than his own ambitions, image and political agenda, and maybe even recognizes that his ambitions, image and political agenda depend on recognizing that.