There are all kinds of blackmail in this world, and they don't necessarily all involve a demand for money.

But before I get to my point, permit me to tell a funny little family story, if I may.

My husband's sister, who I'll call Mary, is an extraordinary woman who, while pretty much straight down the line conservative in her political views, could not be a sweeter, harder working, more beloved individual, and one of the things she does is volunteer at the airport USO, sending planeloads of troops off to war.  The mother of a former Marine who did three combat deployments to Iraq and the aunt of my son, also a former Marine who did two combat deployments to Iraq, and two other nephews, both army, who did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively--to her, every one of those kids are HER kids.

She passes out Care packages to them with phone cards and goodies for the long flights, and smiles and laughs and comforts them and urges them to call home as soon as they get the opportunity, to let their families know they have arrived safely.

Our whole dang family is military.  My husband, Kent, was a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, and he and Mary's older brother did two pretty hairy tours in 'Nam with Special Forces before getting shot up pretty bad (he's okay now).  Their other brother retired a few years ago from Special Forces at the rank of Brigadier General.  Both of his sons are active duty now.

So, needless to say, at family gatherings, all us Mills wimmenfolk feel pretty safe ha ha.

So anyway Mary was doing her thing at the airport one Sunday, and a general happened to be mustering out with his unit, which is somewhat unusual, and none of the volunteers knew what to do with the guy because they were all so intimidated by him, bedazzled, dontcha know, by all those stars. 

Even in their cammies, those generals are impressive dudes.

She asked the other volunteers if anybody had thought to offer the general a Care package and they stared at her, dumbstruck.  "Why NO," they practically shouted.  The very idea sounded positively stupid to them, him being a demi-god and all.

But Mary just snorted and said, "Shoot, he's just somebody's dumb ole big brother, is all."

She grabbed up a box, approached the man, and asked him if he'd like a package and if there was anything she could do for him.  He turned out to be profoundly grateful, and said, "Ma'am, the only thing is, I hate having to hang around here right by my guys, because I don't want them to think I'm checking up on them or anything.  They've got enough on their minds as it is and I don't want to make 'em nervous.  If I could wait someplace private, that would help."

So she found an unoccupied office for him, which he appreciated, and that was that.

I'm not sure what it is about generals that engenders such media and congressional worship. 

Now, don't get me wrong--I have respect for them, too.  My brother-in-law, indeed, my whole family of military men--are pretty damn cool.  My brother-in-law has, himself, been in some pretty hairy situations while in the SF, including negotiating with warlords in the Balkans during the Bosnian conflict, and he did it again with Afghan warlords. 

My son, my husband, his brothers and our nephews--they're tough men, most of them tested in the crucible of battle, honed by fire and loss, defined by courage, and I take nothing away from that, so don't get me wrong, and don't assume I'm being disrespectful to the uniform in any way.

But in order to work your way up to the point where you're pinning stars up on your shoulders, you've left the realm of the battlefield and entered the realm of politics.  You have to be a poltical creature to get those promotions at that level.  Let's face it: there are butts you have to kiss along the way, and games you have to play.  It's the nature of the beast.  By the time you've pinned on more than one star, then more than two or three, you are a consummate player.

I think, too, we must keep in mind that many of the pundits, pontificators, and point-makers have, themselves, NEVER SERVED.  Or, if they did, many of them never saw combat, and that is a crucial point.

Ditto many in Congress who are the biggest armchair warriors out there.  Time and time again, you study the backgrounds of the loudest warmongers and noisiest hawks, you will see draft deferments or otherwise, avoidance of service, or you will see someone who served in a quiet capacity for a couple of years at a desk or something.  (Or a pilot.  You see pilots.) 

It is really rare to see someone like, say, Sen. James Webb or Sen. Chuck Hagel--a real mud-and-guts combat vet--who is a vigorous drum-beater for war.  They have seen the cost, up close and personal, and have no taste for it.

So when a four-star general with his military bearing and his ascetic, monklike habits, and his lean-mean-fighting-machine physicality comes along and he says, "I need this," then the armchair warriors are just so IN AWE of him that they can't scramble fast enough to get the man what he wants.

It never occurs to them that he may be gaming the system.

Think about it.

The Pentagon "leaks" a confidential report that states that if Obama does not give the general a set number of troops WE WILL LOSE THE WAR!!!  And he needs them RIGHT NOW!!!

Oh my God!!!

(We've been at war there the better part of a decade but NEVER MIND!!!)

Right-wingers, ever on the look-out for any opportunity to show up our pussy president for the 98-pound weakling they believe him to be, leap at the red meat like a bunch of chained-up junkyard dogs and start howling GIVE HIM WHAT HE WANTS OR YOU WILL LOSE THE WAR AND THEN WE WILL MAKE SURE YOU LOSE THE WHITE HOUSE!!!

Liberals, ever sensitive to any chance that a war might be fought somewhere in the world, leap to their feet and start screaming, PULL OUT PULL OUT PULL OUT OR WE MIGHT NOT VOTE FOR YOU AGAIN!!!

And the pundits and pontificators and point-makers start running around fawning over the shiny stars on the general's broad shoulders, all about how he only eats ONE MEAL A DAY and how he works out and how he does this and says that, and meanwhile, the general takes the media reps on a full-court press, taking them up in glossy helicopter tours over parts of the country that look good, and his loyal aides are all running around fawning over how wonderful he is, and the senior officers who must report directly to him take the reporters around to parts of the country that look good and talk about how they need 40,000 more troops and then whisk them away before they can talk to any of the actual TROOPS...

And the reporters run home and write all that down and go on the talk shows and parrot all of it...

And then the good general goes to London, and he goes to NATO and he gives talks about how he needs these troops, and then President, er, Senator McCain goes on all the talk shows and tells everybody how we're going to LOSE THE WAR IF WE DON'T GET THOSE TROOPS...

Hmmm.

Now, if the media and the politicians are not aware that they are being manipulated by a Master Politician then they are waaay stupider than I thought.

Fortunately for all of us, we've got a grown-up in the White House who knows political blackmail when he sees it and is oblivious to those tactics.

He really does not care for it.

And unlike his predecessor, he does not develop man-crushes on generals.

Now.

Let's get serious here.  Let's see what the president is looking at, why he is taking so long to look at it, and what he is most likely to do, and why the general's blackmailing scheme is going to fall flat.

(Don't misunderstand.  Of course the general needs the troops.  It's the way he's going about his request that I object to.  More about that later.  Now, about the choices.)

Warning:  Nobody's going to be happy because NONE of the choices are good. 

Liberals want out, period, and anything less than a complete exit strategy will piss them off, so they might as well quit reading now, because he's not going to pull out. 

Right-wingers want at least 200,000 troops there because that's what Gen. Petraeus's manual calls for, if they are honest, which they never are, but failing that, they'd go for 80,000, which is the high end of what McChrystal REALLY wants, but failing that, then they want 40,000, period.  They're not gonna get it, I can tell you right now, so they might as well quit reading, too. 

Moderates know that the whole situation is so precarious that no matter what we do, it is fraught with risk and low pay-off, so they're going to be pretty miserable all the way around, but hell, I'd like SOMEBODY to read the damn thing.

FIRST OF ALL:

On the time he's taking to come to a decision.

Everybody needs to chill out.

We've been there going on nine years.  Another few weeks is not going to win or lose any damn thing in the Middle East, or Near East or wherever the hell it is.  These people hold grudges for centuries, and anyway, it's going to snow soon so nobody'll be fighting in the mountains anyway.

Bob Woodward and Gordon M. Goldstein wrote an incredible piece for the Washington Post called: The Anguish of Decision, in which they combined conversations each had had with Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy at the end of their lives about the decision-making process that took place inside the LBJ White House regarding the Vietnam War.

Basically, LBJ liked to make a show of meeting with advisors but not really listening to them:

Strategy meetings and conversations on the war were a facade, Bundy said. "The principal players do not engage in anything you can really call an exchange of views. . . . That was prevented by him, and the process he used was really for show and not for choice."

Not only did LBJ not really listen to what his advisors have to say, and generally intimidate them from saying what they really felt, but there were important policy decisions that weren't made at all:

Then as now, the choice of a military strategy was the most crucial decision confronting the president. As Bundy reflected, he bemoaned the failure of civilian leaders to probe and scrutinize the assumptions behind the American strategy in Vietnam -- a strategy that over time devolved into an open-ended war of attrition, an endurance contest the United States was unlikely to win. Bundy frequently observed that in 1965, when the administration decided to initiate a massive deployment of ground combat forces to Vietnam, "we debated a number, not a use."

Agreeing to Westmoreland's plan for a war designed to deplete and degrade the enemy until it capitulated, Bundy concluded, was "a major error, and we failed even to address it."

It wasn't just a matter of civilian leadership not challenging the military or the other way around, but the military leadership didn't question its own strategies:

And he singled out the Joint Chiefs of Staff for particular criticism. "I don't think you'll find any record, secret or otherwise, of the chiefs' critical analysis of the military plans in Vietnam," he said. "And that was a very serious deficiency."

...He added: "We don't have the debate and we don't ask the necessary how-strong-is-the-adversary question," or, as he called it elsewhere, the "will-it-work question."

Now, understand that I'm not including these excerpts because I want my comment section to go all ballistic with historians refighting the Vietnam war.  My purpose is to draw comparisons between the lack of debate around the LBJ Situation Room conference table and what we see taking place now in the Obama White House--the very thing that is being most criticized in the media because it seems to be taking so long, which I find ridiculously ironic.

As Woodward and Goldstein sum it up:

Viewed together, McNamara and Bundy's final reflections suggest a shared vision of some of Vietnam's most critical lessons. The two men conclude that the commander in chief must confront his advisers; the advisers, in turn, must confront the commander in chief. And military strategies proposed by the generals must be examined, deconstructed and, if necessary, directly challenged. McNamara and Bundy show how easy it is to fail at these tasks.

THE DANGERS OF ALWAYS TRUSTING GENERALS

Again, I'm not knocking General McChrystal.  He seems highly competent.  I like what I've read about the man, just as I do General Petraeus, and he seems well equipped for this particular war at this particular time.  I understand the special forces mindset and it's what we need for modern warfare.

I also believe that there was indeed a time during the Iraq war when it was clear, from Rumsfeld on down, that the brass was pressured NOT to ask for what they needed because they were not going to get it, and this resulted in a terrible, terrible cost to our guys in the field, including those in my own family, which made my hatred of those managing that war personal.

So I can understand the knee-jerk reaction now to give them what they want, when they want it.

But when it comes to blind obedience to generals, we would do well to remember that the reason Harry Truman fired General MacArthur was not just because of his insubordination, which was waaay over the top--but because MacArthur wanted to use the atomic bomb in China.

He was sure that would be the way to win the Korean war.

Just a little piece of history trivia to keep in mind.  And one more reminder why the writers of our Constitution gave us a civilian commander-in-chief.

In a great op-ed for the Washington Post, General Fallibility, Richard Cohen draws attention to Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1965, who happened to be Gen. William C. Westmoreland.

Cohen points out that Westmoreland was supposed to be a savior to Vietnam, supposed to pull us out of the quagmire, and how when he spoke before Congress in 1967, he was interrupted by applause 19 times.

A year later, both he and President Johnson were gone.

I am certainly not advocating the same thing here, but I am saying that, as Cohen points out, a general's request should be the starting-point for vigorous analysis--as Woodward and Goldstein point out--and debate--not, as Cohen put it, "some sort of holy writ."

Another level-headed take on "surging" troops is Fareed Zakaria, who wrote, "Think Before Surging," for the Washington Post:

In January, 3,000 more troops, originally ordered by Bush, went to Afghanistan in the first days of the Obama presidency. In February, responding to a request from the commander in the field, Obama ordered an additional 17,000 troops into the country. Put another way, over the past 18 months, troop levels in Afghanistan have almost tripled. Sending an additional 40,000 troops would mean an over 300 percent increase in U.S. troops since 2008. (The total surge in Iraq was just over 20,000 troops.) It is not dithering to try to figure out why previous increases have not worked and why we think additional ones would.

In fact, focusing on the number of additional troops needed "misses the point entirely," says Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander Obama put in place this summer. "The key takeaway" from his now-famous assessment "is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way we think and operate." The quotes are from the third paragraph of his 66-page memo. These changes in strategy have just begun.

Yeah, well, that IS a good point.

We've been "surging" troops for the past year, and in fact, not all the troops who have already been ordered to deploy have even gotten there yet, so all this right-wing screaming that if Obama doesn't make up his mind RIGHT NOW THIS VERY MINUTE we will be FINISHED I TELL YOU DONE is just nonsense. 

Troops are already on their way, and in fact, we are counting on pulling out 4,000 troops from Iraq by the end of this month, and we're stuck waiting to see what Maliki does with that situation before we can act on that.  He was dragging his feet on the election for a while yet but two high-profile bombings may have lit a fire under his ass, so to speak.

Those boneheads seem to think that THE TROOPS just materializes POOF out of a magician's hat someplace but they don't.  Combat troops only number so many, and many of those troops are in rotation.  Some are already deployed and some are in training, awaiting one unit's return from deployments so they can then, deploy, you see?

Even when troops are ordered to deploy, it takes months for the deployment to take place.

You don't just yank a combat troop out of Iraq and ship him over to Afghanistan because a Republican says DO IT.

Idiots.

But I digress.

Zakaria mentions the new strategy and I'm not going to get into all the particulars here, but any of you still reading understand that McChrystal favors a "counterinsurgency" that secures pretty much the entire countryside from Taliban brutality, protecting the populace.  This increases troop casualties but cuts down on inncent deaths because, for one thing, troops do not call in air strikes and artillery, as a rule, nor do they travel as often in armored vehicles or live in big fortified bases.  They live among the people and go on foot patrols among them, and concentrate on training Afghans to protect their own.  They only engage Taliban when fired upon.  Drone strikes are used sparingly and only on absolutely accurate Intelligence.

But it will take a lot more U.S. troops to do this because Aghanistan is a large country even if it is spasely populated.

Biden is more in favor of "counterterrorism" which is more chasing al Qaeda and Taliban bad guys using Predator drones and Special Forces troops and requires far fewer U.S. forces.

Unfortunately, we've pretty much been doing that this past eight years and it's been a dismal failure, resulting in high civilian casualties, hatred toward the U.S. and NATO by civilians, and large Taliban takeover of the country.

Zakaria quotes Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, and author of FIASCO, about the Iraq war, Tom Ricks:

One option is the idea Ricks recently suggested to me: "Why not do the Petraeus plan [counterinsurgency] for the major population centers and the Biden plan [counterterrorism] for the rest of the country?" Following that middle course might be the most practical solution; more forces could still be needed, as McChrystal suggests, or perhaps we can make do with the almost 100,000 coalition forces already there.

As soon as I read that, I sat straight up and saw the common-sense approach to it that I knew made the kind of compromise sense President Obama likes.

It's not perfect, and the right-wing would immediately start screaming that it's half-ass, but when you really study the situation, it's not, and in fact, it would appear that this might be the way the administration is, indeed, leaning, according to the New York Times:

President Obama's advisers are focusing on a strategy for Afghanistan aimed at protecting about 10 top population centers, administration officials said Tuesday, describing an approach that would stop short of an all-out assault on the Taliban while still seeking to nurture long-term stability.

Mr. Obama has yet to make a decision and has other options available to him, but as officials described it, the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed. The question of how much of the country should fall under the direct protection of American and NATO forces will be central to deciding how many troops will be sent.

At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.

Of course, that's not the whole shebang.  There are other problems.  They're worried about major agricultural areas like the Helmand River valley, as well as what few major regional highways that do exist.

The article states that Gen. McChrystal has already briefed the president and his advisors on how he would deploy any new troops that would be considered, and in an earlier article I have since misplaced, Admiral Mullen has already conducted two Pentagon war-games using not only the 40,000 troops originally requested by McChrystal, but also a war-game using 10-to-15,000 troops as well, and the results of both have been submitted to the White House.

Meanwhile, the State Department is working closely with the Defense Department to break down the ideology of the multiplex of Taliban tribes, which have local, cultural, and ideological--not jihadist--ties.  Many of them, it is believed, can be worked with in much the same way that Sunni tribal warlords in the Anbar province in Iraq were worked with in the Awakening movement that turned the course of the war in 2007 and 2008.

What this does, in effect, is blend the two ideas put forth by Vice President Biden and General McChrystal.

It was part of McChrystal's strategy all along to withdraw the majority of troops into the major population centers anyway, so this in no way works against what he has been trying to do.

There is a great deal remaining, of course, to be worked out, and none of it is ideal, and it all remains to be seen whether any of it will help to stabilize that Medieval country of tribes, warlords, villages, and opium crops.

When President Obama asked General McChrystal for a full assessment of the situation in Afghanistan back in March, and an idea for a strategy with several options, the 20,000, 40,000, or 80,000 troop strategies were the ones put forth by McChrystal in his assessment.

However, in the ensuing time frame, and in McChrystal's own assessment, the full extent of the corruption of the Karzai government came to light, as well as the phony election results, which negated the legitimacy of the government in th eyes of the populace and gave the Taliban more room to propagandize their position.

This makes even McChrystal's own strategy tough to implement, because we need a government that supports us and that we can support, not a corrupt puppet we seem to be holding up.  He acknowledges as much, even as the president's critics ignore it.

This is what makes the choices before Obama so impossible.  Sure, we all want to just get the hell out of that place.  I don't want to lose any of my cherished family members over there, I can tell you that.  But I am a realist.

The Taliban has become powerful enough in their own right that they no longer even need al Qaeda to be their own terrorist organization, as they have proven in Pakistan.  And Pakistan, as we all know, possesses nuclear weapons.  The whole situation is a tinderbox.  We really can't simply pull out now the way we did in the 80's--the repercussions to the entire area would be catastrophic.

Nor can we start from scratch, send hundreds of thousands of troops, and build the whole country up from the ground.  Not now.  Not after eight miserable years of hemorrhaging blood and treasure.

We have to find a middle ground, some way to secure the populace, send over some civilian help, train their security forces--even if we have to pay them--buy off those Taliban who can be bought, if we can--and get the country reasonably stable.

It truly is a matter of national security.  (And yes, al Qaeda is in places like Yemen.  Special Forces is on it already, trust me.)  But this one, this one's big.

And if Obama stands up to General McChrystal and refuses to buckle under the blackmail threat that was hurled at him by McChrystal (or at least, Cheney) loyalists at the Pentagon, he will not be showing weakness at all.  In fact, he will be showing a sign of great strength.

It takes balls to stand up to those shiny stars and say, "Not this time."

The liberals will scream at him for "escalating" the war, and when the conservatives will yell at him for "losing" the war or "half-assing" the war or whatever the hell it is, and Cheney loyalists at the Pentagon will howl that he is making the country dangerously weak, and McChrystal loyalists will mutter (without attribution of course) that it's going to be really tough to "win" the war now...

Yeah, sometimes, it takes more courage to stand up to a general than it does to actually BE one.