Below The Beltway

Many on the right side of the blogosphere have had much to say about this interesting tidbit from an interview with General Stanley McChrystal, Commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, regarding his personal contact with the President:

The military general credited with capturing Saddam Hussein and killing the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says he has spoken with President Obama only once since taking command in Afghanistan.

“I’ve talked to the president, since I’ve been here, once on a VTC [video teleconferece],” Gen. Stanley McChrystal told CBS reporter David Martin in a television interview that aired Sunday.

“You’ve talked to him once in 70 days?” Mr. Martin followed up.

“That is correct,” the general replied.

Former U.N. Representative John Bolton, who seems to have taken the lead when it comes to Republican criticism on the foreign policy front was among the first two weigh in:

Bolton said this was indicative of Mr. Obama’s misplaced priorities.

I think it’s very clear, and has been during last year’s campaign and in the eight months the president has been in office, that he just doesn’t regard foreign policy and national security as important as domestic issues, like reforming the health care system,” Mr. Bolton told the hosts of The Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” on Monday.

He went on: “If you think there are no threats, then it’s not illogical to pay no attention to the rest of the world. The problem is in his [Obama’s] basic reading of the international environment where we do continue to face massive threats for international terrorists and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, among others.”

John Noonan at The Weekly Standard, meanwhile, uses the opportunity to take a dig:

What does it say about your Commander-in-Chief when he’s spoken with David Letterman more than his key guy in Afghanistan?

As does Michelle Malkin:

Obama is for “engagement” and “dialogue” with everyone else in the world except his own military commanders.

There is, however, another side to the story. What Bolton, Noonan, and Malkin all seem to forget about is a little thing called the Chain of Command:

[Critics contend] this is evidence of “Obama’s — thus far — limited personal involvement in the Afghan war.” No, it’s not. It’s Obama’s return to normal procedure — I don’t think having the President micro-manage a conflict a world away is a particularly smart. McChrystal reports to General David Petraeus, who in turn reports up-the-line of command. The videoconference bit made me recall this Steve Coll article on President Bush’s approach to managing wars:

The General’s relationship with Bush proved to be one of the easiest to manage. At least once a week, the General and Ambassador Crocker participated in a videoconference with the President, the Vice-President, General Pace or his deputy, and Admiral William Fallon, Abizaid’s successor at CENTCOM, among others. The video meetings allowed Petraeus and Bush to communicate directly, and they also permitted Bush to avoid ponderous Cabinet-level deliberations by making his intentions on Iraq clear to all of his uniformed commanders simultaneously. Fallon, however, was uneasy about the conferences; the Admiral was Petraeus’s superior, and the videoconferences did not conform to a normal chain of command. Pace supported this approach, as an exigency of war. “For the President to be talking directly to his senior commander in the field makes all the sense in the world in a war where you have the capacity” through video links, he believed. Inexorably, however, tensions developed between Fallon’s command staff, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, and Petraeus’s staff at Victory Base.

Not long after the surge began, for example, Fallon undertook his own independent review of Iraq strategy; he dispatched Vice-Admiral James A. Winnefeld, Jr., to Iraq to examine the war. Fallon had to balance troop deployments to Iraq with requirements elsewhere in the Middle East and Afghanistan. He questioned whether Petraeus might be able to plan troop reductions on a faster timetable. Petraeus ultimately had his way, but the back-and-forth ratcheted up the pressure on the General’s staff. Petraeus’s aides felt that Fallon should be trying to win support for Iraq from neighboring Middle Eastern governments, not second-guessing their strategy and deployment timetables.

The fact that Obama isn’t meeting with McChrystal directly isn’t indicative of anything, because it doesn’t mean that he isn’t meeting with McChrystal’s bosses — General David Petraeus at Central Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Until you can provide some evidence of that, this is really much ado about nothing.

As an aside, though, there is something else troubling about this in that it indicates a tendency on McChrystal’s part to attempt to basically go over Obama’s head and speak directly, sometimes negatively, to the media. We saw it with the leak of the incomplete report on Afghanistan, and we see it with this. That’s not conduct that a military officer should be engaging in.