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One of the great curses of our age is that we are ruled by leaders who have never heard a shot fired in anger. Would Iraq have been invaded if George W Bush had actually fought in Vietnam, instead of sitting it out in Houston and Dallas country clubs? Could Tony Blair have dispatched our Armed Forces to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan if he had ever seen the ravages of war? Our leaders haven’t got a clue. I remember when Mrs Thatcher was sending the task force down to the Falklands, and the arguments I had with my dad....

If finding Obama "not engaged," as Gen. McChrystal did, is now a firing offense, who among us is safe? What do Gen. McChrystal and British Petroleum have in common? Aside from the fact that they're both Democratic Party supporters. Or they were. Stanley McChrystal is a liberal who voted for Obama and banned Fox News from his HQ TV. Which may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone: They'll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades. The management of...

President Obama has fired the warrior's warrior, in the mind of the Narcissus, he visualizes a great personal victory and assumes the rest of the world admires his triumph over an insubordinate General who was respected by his troops and feared by the enemy.  Traits the self-conscious Narcissus, feels in his heart, are rightfully his. Now with the symbolic head of the general in his left hand and the bloody symbolic sword of retribution and revenge in his right hand, Obama poses for the rest of the world, while silently intimating how he, Obama The Omnipotent, will deal with...

Now that this story is about to enter its third day, the overwhelming response on talk radio and on TV from what I can tell and I haven’t been following it every second is that Obama did the right thing in firing General McChrystal. The media is going overboard in commending him for his selection of General Petraeus even though they and their Democrat allies in Congress treated him with utter disdain when he introduced his surge plan for turning the War in Iraq into a decisive victory for the US as well as George W Bush, a fact that...

The recent change in commanders in Afghanistan is proof the U.S and its allies have lost the war, statements posted on two Islamist websites said Thursday. Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousif Ahmadi said in one statement President Barack Obama wanted to save face by firing Gen. Stanley McChrystal and bringing in Gen. David Petraeus. McChrystal was relieved of duty -- although he technically resigned -- Wednesday after he and his staff made comments in a Rolling Stone magazine article that appear to mock top civilian officials, including the vice president. "History is evident of more powerful and experienced generals than...

The Western way of war By Caroline Glick General McChrsytal teaches us a truth of 21st century warfare in the West. US General Stanley McChrystal has paid a huge price for his decision to give Rolling Stone reporter Micahel Hastings free access to himself and his staff. But he performed a great service for the rest of us. US President Barack Obama fired McChrystal -- his hand-picked choice to command NATO forces in Afghanistan -- for the things that he and his aides told Hastings about the problematic nature of the US-led war effort in Afghanistan. But by acting as...

Conservatives should shed no tears over Gen. Stanley McChrystal's forced resignation as U.S. commander in Afghanistan this week. The man may have been a brilliant military strategist -- and is certainly a fine patriot -- but he exercised exceedingly poor judgment, which began long before he agreed to a Rolling Stone profile that got him fired. What's more, he squandered the chance to make a forceful case that the political calculus governing the Obama administration's Afghanistan policy endangers American lives and makes success less likely. McChrystal's first mistake was to vote for Barack Obama.

All that mattered Wednesday was the mission. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal deserved to be fired for the contemptuous remarks that he and members of his staff made to a reporter about President Obama and his national security team. But Obama would have been justified in sticking with McChrystal if, in the president's estimation, firing General Loose Lips would have done significant harm to the mission -- achieving our nation's goals in Afghanistan. Fortunately, Obama struck on a way to do what's best for the United States -- reaffirm the primacy of civilian command over the military -- without compromising the...

This week the entire journalistic pundit pack embraced the control-the-message dictates of political spin and corporate public relations as they excoriated Gen. Stanley McChrystal for allowing a Rolling Stone reporter to spend a month with him and his entourage. The derogatory towel-snapping mockery that cost McChrystal his Afghan command was often depicted as less of a mistake than his naiveté in cooperating with a magazine profile-writer.

President Obama said Wednesday that he didn't fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal over policy disagreements. Too bad. Almost every metric measuring military progress in Afghanistan has gone downhill since McChrystal took command a year ago, as an April Pentagon report detailed. More recently, a UN report revealed that incidents involving improvised-explosive devices -- the main killer of our troops -- rose 94 percent in the first four months of 2010 over a year earlier. It's notable that one of the few strong statements of support for McChrystal came from Afghanistan's most notorious crime boss -- whom McChrystal had claimed as an...

Of all the names associated with the now-celebrated Rolling Stone article on Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- Obama, Biden, Jones, Eikenberry, Holbrooke -- the one that matters most is Hicks. He is Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks, who, among other NCOs, confronted McChrystal over his policy to avoid, almost at all costs, inflicting causalities on the Afghan civilian population. The result was that more Americans were being killed and the war, in the view of the men fighting it, was being lost. “Sir,” Hicks said to McChrystal at a combat outpost in Afghanistan, “some of the guys here, sir, think were losing,...

Kabul circles say the dismissal of US commander was over leaking information including NATO's connection with the executed leader of the Jundallah terrorist group, Abdolmalek Rigi. Head of Press TV's office in Kabul, Mohammad Ruhi, says US commander General Stanley McChrystal was sacked for acknowledging NATO's connection with the executed leader of the Pakistan-based Jundallah terrorist group, Abdolmalek Rigi. He dismissed the official reasons for the firing of McChrystal, saying his growing friendship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and intelligence leaks may have triggered the replacement. The move caused a scandal, and a British minister was sacked. In retaliation, London...

WASHINGTON -- Set aside for a moment how inconceivable it is that an article in Rolling Stone magazine could be the cause of anyone's being fired -- much less a U.S. commanding general in the midst of a war. But that is what happened this week. Gen. Stanley McChrystal is a tough, combat-experienced officer who knows how to fight. He knows how to kill the enemy. But he clearly doesn't get it when it comes to the media. His staff let him down -- badly -- by allowing Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone to hang around with a tape recorder....

Mr. Dasey, you tell me how Barack Obama, the putative president and so-called “Commander-in-Chief,” was able to legally and ethically secure the resignation of a four-star general and American hero, Stanley McChrystal! Obama has no legal or moral authority to do any such thing! Barack Obama (assuming that’s his real name) is not, as our Constitution defines it and requires, a “natural born citizen”! I don’t care if he looks “black” (he’s mostly Arabic in ethnicity, and he has admitted to being a Muslim as opposed to Christian). I don’t care if the people elected him “President,” as it was...

President Obama rids himself of a particularly clueless general, but his fundamental problem remains. The clueless general is Stanley A. McChrystal. His fundamental problem is himself.

Why would General Stanley McChrystal give that kind of access to a lefty rock-n-roll magazine? Maybe because he's a kindred spirit who felt the need to assure Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings that he voted for Obama — even against McCain, a military legend who shares McChrystal's transnational progressive outlook. "Now it can be told," elaborates Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic "The story about [McChrystal] voting for Obama is not contrived. He is a political liberal. He is a social liberal. He banned Fox News from the television sets in his headquarters. Yes, really." Yes, really. The revealing Rolling Stone profile...

I think this would've been better if the term was can of kick ass. Click the image above to see a larger version. The Looking Spoon is a conservative humor/satire/art/commentary blog, visit www.thelookingspoon.com to see more posts and art

http://www.3news.co.nz/What-did-McChrystal-say-to-risk-losing-his-job/tabid/313/articleID/162324/Default.aspx Instead of all the "interpretations" and editorialized meanings, let's get quote on quote statements by the general and post them here. Unlike the news that wants to tell me what something means to the point where I don't even hear or see what he actually said anymore because it's so shrouded with their BS, let's actually read the statements themselves.

Stanley McChrystal is no Douglas MacArthur or George McClellan. But President Barack Obama has treated him like one. Harry Truman sacked Gen. MacArthur, commander of American forces in the Korean War, for publicly attacking his acceptance of a divided peninsula. Abraham Lincoln fired Gen. McClellan, commander of the Union Army, for a lack of aggression against the Confederate forces. McClellan didn't help his case by avoiding the president, refusing to disclose his campaign plans, and privately referring to Lincoln as "nothing more than a well-meaning baboon," a "gorilla," and "ever unworthy" of the presidency. By all accounts, Gen. McChrystal, who...

For the first time in the joint NBC News and The Wall Street Journal poll, more American disapprove (48%) of President Obama’s job performance than approve (45%). And for the first time in his presidency, more than 60 percent believe the country is on the wrong track. A combination of the oil crisis in the gulf, concerns about the current deficit, and pessimism about the economy has contributed to the president's declining poll numbers. And as he relieves Gen. Stanley McChrystal of his command in Afghanistan, President Obama’s scores on being able to handle a crisis and on being decisive...