Barack Obama met with General Stanley McChrystal for about 25 minutes this morning in Copenhagen, after McChrystal flew to Denmark from London to meet with the commander-in-chief. A meeting is better than no meeting, to be sure. But the circumstances surrounding this one are revealing. Obama’s first substantive face-to-face meeting with the man he handpicked to lead US forces in Afghanistan — the war that Obama has said for seven years is a war that must be won — lasted about as long as it takes to get a haircut. And it came after the White House spent days deflecting criticism after McChrystal told “60 Minutes” that he had only spoken with Obama once in 70 days. So the meeting was an add-on, squeezed in between meetings and photo-ops in support of the main purpose of his trip: to pitch Chicago as the host-city for the 2016 Olympics. Obama did that, too. His presentation, in which he waxed eloquent on the “sacred trust” between a host city and the Olympics, lasted 15 minutes. Obama also participated in a Q&A session with members of the International Olympic Committee and, later, attended an informal reception with them. After that, he spent some time with Denmark’s Queen Margarethe and Prince Henrik, found a few minutes for a photo-op with Denmark’s Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen and spent some more time in a private meeting with the Danish leader. If Obama believes he doesn’t need to spend much time with McChrystal, it could be because his top advisers know much more than the general. How do we know? They tell us in a fascinating Washington Post article on yesterday’s Afghanistan meeting at the White House. McChrystal, who has been in Afghanistan since June, accompanied by uniformed and civilian experts on counterinsurgency, has been relying on “myths” about the country and our war there.
Oh right, not “myths” but mistaken assumptions. And who at the White House knows so much to expose these mistaken assumptions? “According to White House officials involved in the meeting, Vice President Biden offered some of the more pointed challenges to McChrystal, who attended the session by video link from Kabul.” It’s necessary to question assumptions, of course. But why should we believe that White House advisers and Joe Biden — who wanted to divide Iraq into three parts and warned repeatedly that a surge there would never work — have a better understanding than McChrystal and CENTCOM Commander David Petraeus, who supports McChrystal’s assessment? We shouldn’t.
