Panic In (And Near) The Oval

The really huge buzz last week surrounded the firing of Shirley Sherrod. The woman, a functionary in the Department of Agriculture's Georgia state office was summarily fired after a carefully extracted and edited snippet from a speech she had made to the state's NAACP last spring went on Fox TV and the web.

A flurry of phone calls from the highest reaches of the department and White House demanded Ms Sherrod immediately resign due to the obvious racism expressed in the snippet. No effort was made by her accusers, including the national office of the NAACP, to hear her side of the story. Nor was any effort expended to assess the snippet and its apparent anti-Caucasian sentiments in the context of the entire presentation.

The firing, which was later retracted by President Obama, like the condemnation made by the NAACP, showed an unmistakable panic. It was a rush to judgement of the most intemperate sort. For Ms Sherrod the affair did finally break her way when the entire speech was viewed, the alleged victim of Ms Sherrod's "racism" located, and a few deep breaths taken by the crowd surrounding the Oval Office. The woman received an apology from President Obama and the offer of another, presumably better, job.

"Hey, Geek! I thought you wrote a foreign policy blog. What's the deal here? Have you unilaterally put the Ag Department in the national security establishment? Or just gone, you know, a bit funny?"

Well, Bucko, it's like this. The Sherrod affair has a perfect parallel in the sacking of General Stanley McChrystal whose retirement ceremony went down yesterday evening at Fort McNair. The general was just as much a victim of blind panic in and near the Oval as was Ms Sherrod.

General McChrystal was accused of violating the hoary doctrine of civilian supremacy by virtue of having said uncomplimentary things about Mr Obama and others in the civilian chain of command to a Rolling Stone magazine writer. The comments, unkind as they were, made by either the general or members of his staff, in no way constituted insubordination or even a criticism of the civilian supremacy. (Nor were they inaccurate.)

The general was not given any opportunity to tell his side of the story. Nor were the unkind remarks considered in context. In these ways the situations of Ms Sherrod and General McChrystal were identical.

Any number of pundits and retired conventional soldiers showing the long standing bias against special forces personnel played the role of the NAACP in the Sherrod Affair. This Greek chorus brayed after McChrystal's scalp just as the politburo of the NAACP did in the case of Ms Sherrod. In both cases the chorus sought blood for sins uncommitted but merely imagined on the basis of snippets, edited versions of the totality.

The firings of both Ms Sherrod and General McChrystal were the actions of persons demented by fear and panic. The Nice Young Man (Of The People) From Chicago and his cronies were under the intense pressures of failure grudgingly admitted in the days and weeks before both summary sackings. The president and his "team" had been repeatedly and accurately excoriated for a collective and personal inability to make decisions, act decisively, or even give the appearance of giving the slightest damn about what was happening in and to the US.

The Great Transformational Agenda was falling apart in both its domestic and foreign affairs aspects. The more the president and his surrogates spoke, declaimed, hectored, the less anyone anywhere paid any attention. In the days immediately preceding the McChrystal firing (as well as the Sherrod dismissal) the president was looking more and more as if he had become the walking, talking version of Mao's description of the US--a "paper tiger."

In this situation panic is expectable--but not forgivable. While there were many far better ways in which Mr Obama could have handled the temporary embarrassment of the McChrystal remarks in ways which would have redounded to his credit, Mr Obama acted out of both pique and panic. As a consequence he undercut gravely the national interests of the US not only in Afghanistan but around the world. He also deprived the US of the future services of one of the finest soldiers and warriors to come down the pike in the last half-century or more.

While Mr Obama did the same in the Sherrod Affair, acted out of pique and panic, he could reverse the personal damage, the ill-considered and overly hasty rush to (miscarried) judgement done to the woman personally. And, with all due respect to both Ms Sherrod and the Department of Agriculture, the loss of her services to the US now and in the future did no harm to our national interests.

It is impossible for the president to undo the damage his loss of poise, his succumbing to pique and panic inflicted upon the US in the firing of General McChrystal. All Mr Obama can do is to start writing on volume three of his memoirs, specifically the chapter in which he will try to exculpate himself for the defeat in Afghanistan.