US Moves Ahead in World Cup!

Who would have thunk it?

clipped from www.herald-mail.com U.S. wins, advances to World Cup’s second round The United States has advanced to the second round of the 2010 World Cup with a dramatic 1-0 victory over Algeria. Landon Donovan scored off a rebound in the first minute of stoppage time to put the Americans into the round of 16. With England’s 1-0 victory over Slovenia just minutes earlier, the U.S. would have been eliminated from the tournament with a loss or a tie. The U.S., which won Group C, will play Saturday against the second-place finisher of Group D. That group includes Germany, Ghana, Serbia and Australia.

McChrystal Relieved of Duty…

McChrystal is out and Petraeus is in (his former assignment, no?). The President has made the decision that shows he is in charge of the military.

Now… can we really have a counter-insurgency status in Afghanistan. I just heard former Defense Secretary, Bill Cohen on MSNBC,  say “No.” General Barry McCaffrey, also on MSNBC, agreed with Cohen.

Everyone is waiting for Obama to come out and speak. AS I watch TV, he is coming out.

“Today I accepted General Stanley McChrystal’s resignation…”, Obama started out and then said nice words about McChrystal’s skills and ability to carry out orders.

I don’t hear him saying that we are pulling out of Afghanistan.

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UPDATE:

Obama’s statement:

And I would consider this the Quote of the Day:

“The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general. It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our Democratic system, and it erodes the trust that’s necessary for our team to work together to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan.”

Quickie Update on McChrystal

According to all reports, the meeting between the General and the President lasted about twenty minutes.

After the meeting, McChrystal abruptly left and did not go in to attend the full staff war meeting.

Obama said he would make a statement later in the day, but as of now, McChrystal’s status is unknown.

So what is Obama going to do with General Stanley McChrystal?

We should find out today. The General has been called in to have a face-to-face with the President, plus there will be a meeting of all the civilian and military folks who plan this war in Afghanistan, including those cabinet members and the Vice President that McChrystal and his staff also insulted in the Rolling Stone article.

Every different pundit is guessing that either something…or nothing (more like Obama’s record so far)… will happen.  McChrystal may be fired, or just brought down a peg in public, or stripped of his associates, or… well you get the idea,

James Fallows, in The Atlantic, yesterday, said the following:

If the facts are as they appear — McChrystal and his associates freely mocking their commander in chief and his possible successor (ie, Biden) and the relevant State Department officials (Holbrooke and Eikenberry) — with no contention that the quotes were invented or misconstrued, then Obama owes it to past and future presidents to draw the line and say: this is not tolerable. You must go. McChrystal’s team was inexplicably reckless in talking before a reporter this way, but that’s a separate question. The fact is — or appears to be — that they did it.

I agree with Fallows. This is what should happen. But there have been enough occasions that everyone thought Obama would do something, and he did something else… pulled back or underplayed one thing or another.

Obama could also have McChrystal courtmartialed under existing law. Spencer Ackerman in the very conservative Washington Independent looks at it this way:

Regardless of whether McChrystal should be fired — there’s, frankly, a compelling case to be made when considering the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s penalty of court martial for “any commissioned officer [using] contemptuous words” against the civilian chain of command — my guess is that he won’t be. Obama summoned McChrystal back to Washington pretty much immediately after the story hit, which suggests that he’s not thinking about a wholesale revision of his strategy.

So now we wait and see what Obama does. Will he get rid of McChrystal and secure the authority of civilian control of the military? Will he humiliate McChrystal and let him hang about on the vine with his staff, then keep him in place… thus keeping the Afghanistan action in place without change?

My guess is that McChrystal keeps his job and this stupid war goes on undiminished.

I hope I’m wrong.