Mr Obama, General McChrystal and the chain of command

Many on the right side of the blogosphere are concerned with the revelation that Mr Obama has only spoken once to the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. Below the Beltway takes a different view and says this is more a case of Mr Obama paying due attention to the chain of command. 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.

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