Top war officer irks Obama

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he wants to hear directly from Gen. Stanley McChrystal before deciding whether to fire the Afghanistan war commander over remarks made to Rolling Stone magazine.

Obama said McChrystal and his aides showed “poor judgment.”

In his first comments on the matter, Obama said Tuesday that he would meet with McChrystal at the White House today and that Defense Secretary Robert Gates will be meeting with the commander as well.

“I think it’s clear that the article in which he and his team appeared showed a poor - showed poor judgment,” the president said, surrounded by members of his Cabinet at the close of their meeting. “But I also want to make sure that I talk to him directly before I make any final decisions.”

The article, in Rolling Stone magazine’s latest edition, quotes the general and his aides as criticizing Vice President Joe Biden, National Security Adviser James Jones and U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Karl Eikenberry.

Presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president read the Rolling Stone article in the White House residence last night and “was angry.”

As the top U.S. civilian and military officials in Afghanistan, Eikenberry and McChrystal are required to jointly implement U.S. policy in the country.

Two military officials told The Associated Press that McChrystal would arrive prepared to hand in his resignation. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The general apologized Tuesday for his remarks. He issued a five-sentence statement after news organizations published excerpts from the Rolling Stone article.

“I extend my sincerest apology,” McChrystal said in the statement e-mailed by the press office of his command, the International Security Assistance Force, in Afghanistan. “It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened.”

Duncan Boothby, a civilian communication adviser to the general who was responsible for arranging the Rolling Stoneinterview, submitted his resignation Tuesday, a defense official said.

Gates and Jones rebuked McChrystal, saying the U.S. military’s advice to the president should be given privately.

Gates said McChrystal made “a significant mistake” and used poor judgment.

‘THE RUNAWAY GENERAL’

The Rolling Stone profile, titled “The Runaway General,” mentions the first meeting that McChrystal had with Obama the week after he took office. They met with a dozen senior military officials in a Pentagon room known as The Tank. The reporter of the article cites a source familiar with the meeting saying that McChrystal thought Obama appeared “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the room filled with military brass.

The article also describes the first one-on-one meeting McChrystal had with Obama in the Oval Office four months later, which an adviser to McChrystal called “a 10-minute photo op.”

McChrystal is described by an aide as “disappointed” in this first meeting with the president. While McChrystal voted for Obama, the two didn’t connect from the start, the article says.

In the Rolling Stone article, one aide calls Jones, a retired four-star general, “a clown” who is “stuck in 1985.”

McChrystal has been at odds over the Afghan war strategy with Biden, who originally opposed McChrystal’s plan for increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and with Eikenberry, who was reported by Bloomberg News in November to have expressed reservations to Obama about a military buildup before Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government took steps to fight corruption and mismanagement.

The article’s author, former Newsweek writer Michael Hastings, said McChrystal and his staff, while preparing for a question-and-answer session in Paris, imagined ways of dismissing Biden “with a good one-liner.”

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal said, according to the article, trying out a possible answer. “Who’s that?”

“Biden?” a top adviser to the general is quoted as saying. “Did you say: Bite Me?”

McChrystal also told the magazine he was “betrayed” by Eikenberry. He accused Eikenberry of raising doubts about the reliability of Karzai only to give himself cover in case the U.S. effort failed.

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

REMARKS WORRY SENATORS

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, called McChrystal’s remarks “inappropriate” and told reporters on Capitol Hill he was “very troubled.”

Levin stopped short of calling for McChrystal to be fired. If the comments reflected a policy disagreement, the president would have “no alternative” but to fire him, Levin said. McChrystal’s comments reflect more of a “personality problem,” the senator said.

John McCain of Arizona, the panel’s ranking Republican, Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said in a statement, “General McChrystal’s comments, as reported in Rolling Stone, are inappropriate and inconsistent with the traditional relationship between commander-inchief and the military.”

“The decision concerning General McChrystal’s future is a decision to be made by the president,” they said.

AFGHAN, NATO PRAISE

Karzai’s chief spokesman said the Afghan leader believes that McChrystal is a person of “great integrity” and had displayed a very good understanding of the Afghan people and the Afghan culture.

“The president believes that Gen. McChrystal is the best commander that NATO and coalition forces have had in Afghanistan over the past nine years,” spokesman Waheed Omar said. Omar said McChrystal has worked closely with Karzai since McChrystal took command last year, and “lots of things have improved.”

McChrystal also received a vote of confidence from the secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who appeared concerned over the effect of a possible change of command at a time of rising casualties and faltering political support within allied capitals.

“The Rolling Stone article is rather unfortunate, but it is just an article,” the alliance said in a statement issued in Brussels. “We are in the middle of a very real conflict, and the secretary general has full confidence in Gen. McChrystal as the NATO commander, and in his strategy.”

The Taliban reacted to McChrystal’s predicament with glee. Spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid called it a sign of disarray and “the beginning of political defeat” for the Westin Afghanistan.

‘A FIRING OFFENSE’

But even some of McChrystal’s staunchest backers regarding Afghanistan said the comments leave him open to dismissal.

“I say this as someone who admired and respects Stan McChrystal enormously. The country doesn’t know how much good he’s done. But this is a firing offense,” said Eliot Cohen, who served as a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the latter days of the Bush administration.

But relieving McChrystal of his command on the eve of a major offensive in Kandahar, which White House and Pentagon officials have said is the most critical of the war, would be a major blow to the war effort, said another military expert. The president has set a July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

“My advice is to call him back to Washington, publicly chastise him and then make it clear that there is something greater at stake here,” said Nathaniel Fick, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now chief executive of the Center for a New American Security. “It takes time for anyone to get up to speed, and right now time is our most precious commodity in Afghanistan.” If Obama believes that the current counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan is the right one, then he cannot afford to jettison McChrystal, Fick said. Information for this article was contributed by Ben Feller, Anne Gearan, Jennifer Loven, Pauline Jelinek, Kimberly Dozier, Laurie Kellman, Matthew Lee, Anne Flaherty, Robert H. Reid, Deb Riechmann, Amir Shah and Julie Pace of The Associated Press; by Roger Runningen, Tony Capaccio, Viola Gienger and James Rupert of Bloomberg News; by Julian E. Barnes and Laura King of the Los Angeles Times; and by Greg Jaffe and Ernesto Londoqo of The Washington Post.