Afghan Gen. McChrystal on Obama: "Unimpressed" With His "10 Minute Photo Ops" …Update: President Thin-Skin Calls McChrystal to White House

Top Afghaninstan General Stanley McChrystal is in hot water after mocking Vice President Joe Biden and President Obama in a Rolling Stone article this month.

Of course, nothing McChrystal said in the article about the Obama Administration was untrue. That’s what makes it so embarrassing for Team O.
The AFP reported:

General Stanley McChrystal and the White House are on full display in the unflattering article in Rolling Stone, but the general said it was all a mistake.

“I extend my sincerest apology for this profile,” McChrystal said in a statement issued hours after the article was released.

“It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never happened.”

…In the profile, McChrystal jokes sarcastically about preparing to answer a question referring to Vice President Joe Biden, known as a skeptic of the commander’s war strategy.

“‘Are you asking about Vice President Biden?’ McChrystal says with a laugh. ‘Who’s that?'” the article quotes him as saying.

“‘Biden?’ suggests a top adviser. ‘Did you say: Bite Me?'”

McChrystal tells the magazine that he felt “betrayed” by the US ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, in a White House debate over war strategy last year.

Referring to a leaked internal memo from Eikenberry that questioned McChrystal’s request for more troops, the commander suggested the ambassador had tried to protect himself for history’s sake.

“I like Karl, I’ve known him for years, but they’d never said anything like that to us before,” McChrystal tells the magazine.

“Here’s one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.'”

Eikenberry, himself a former commander in Afghanistan, had written to the White House saying Afghan President Hamid Karzai was an unreliable partner and that a surge of troops could draw the United States into a open-ended quagmire.

The article revisits the friction between the White House and the military last fall as Obama debated whether to grant McChrystal’s request for tens of thousands of reinforcements.

Although Obama in the end granted most of what McChrystal asked for, the strategy review was a difficult time, the general tells the magazine.

“I found that time painful,” McChrystal says. “I was selling an unsellable position.”

An unnamed adviser to McChrystal alleges the general came away unimpressed after a meeting with Obama in the Oval Office a year ago.

“It was a 10-minute photo op,” the general’s adviser says.

“Obama clearly didn?t know anything about him, who he was… he didn’t seem very engaged.

“The boss was pretty disappointed,” says the adviser.

UPDATE: President Thin Skin called General McChrystal to the White House today after the release of the Rolling Stone article.
FOX News reported:

The top U.S. war commander in Afghanistan is being called to the White House for a face-to-face meeting with President Obama after issuing an apology Tuesday for an interview in which he described the president as unprepared for their first meeting.

In the article in this week’s issue of Rolling Stone, Gen. Stanley McChrystal also said he felt betrayed and blind-sided by his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.

McChrystal’s comments are reverberating through Washington and the Pentagon after the magazine depicted him as a lone wolf on the outs with many important figures in the Obama administration.

It characterized him as unable to convince some of his own soldiers that his strategy can win the nation’s longest-running war and dejected that the president didn’t know about his commendable military record.

In Kabul on Tuesday, McChrystal issued a statement saying: “I extend my sincerest apology for this profile. It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened.”

McChrystal has been called to the White House Situation Room on Wednesday to explain his comments to the magazine directly to the president, a senior administration official told Fox News. Normally, he would appear on a conference call for a regular strategy session.

McChrystal also called Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen late Monday to apologize. Mullen told the general he was deeply disappointed, according to a senior military official at the Pentagon.

It looks like Team O is going to browbeat McChrystal for telling the truth that we all know. The Community Organizer in Chief is an utter failure at war, too.
Sad.

UPDATE: Jules Crittenden added this:

He should have just stuck with the Biden jokes. He’d still be sticking pins in maps in Bagram.

Sure hope this distraction doesn’t compromise combat operations, get anyone killed for no reason, anything like that, over something stupid like egos and politics. Then again, they’re already working with a three-quarters surge with a deadline …

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

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