Gen. McChrystal: Should he stay or should he go?

3.    Counter-Insurgency: The article’s real purpose came in its last few lines: “So far, counter-insurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war.” It is surely no accident that the article was released just as the Afghan surge reached its height — when strengths and inevitable difficulties were thrown into sharpest relief. Whatever his other failings — as diplomat, politician or policy wonk — Stanley McChrystal has the “deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter” — those rough, ruthless and sometimes blood-stained qualities needed to command our war in Afghanistan.

Key Issue: Would Patton ever succeed in today’s Army? When Obama decides McChrystal’s fate, we will surely find out.

4.    Presidential Leadership: From Iranian nuclear intransigence to the Gulf oil disaster, there is a steadily growing consensus that Obama is to leadership what eggs are to bacon — engaged but not committed. Such judgments might be corrected by firing General McChrystal as a show of strength: but who would replace him? And would American policies in Afghanistan and elsewhere benefit from relieving the second commander to be placed in that most demanding – and maybe impossible — position?

Key Issue: Rolling Stone also underlined the persistent divisions within the administration’s foreign policy establishment — flaws that cannot be corrected by dismissing one man.

As Les Gelb summed it up in yesterday’s Daily Beast, “Whatever righteous anger McChrystal had on his side … he and his staff had no business, and no right under the chain of command … to say what they did to the Rolling Stone reporter, or anyone else.” Exactly right. But how Obama reacts to this improbable crisis will help to define his foreign policy — maybe even his presidency.

Colonel Ken Allard (U.S. Army, Ret.) is a draftee who eventually served on the West Point faculty, as dean of the National War College and as a NATO peacekeeper in Bosnia (which seemed like a huge deal at the time). His most recent book, Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War, is a memoir of his 10 years as a military analyst with NBC News and MSNBC, where he and Tucker Carlson were conservatives-in-residence.