John Burns and Dexter Filkins Answer Questions on McChrystal’s Dismissal

If anybody Dexter Seasons 1-3 DVD boxsetdoubted Dexter Seasons 1-3 DVD boxsetthat President Obama’s decision to fire Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was a watershed moment – not only in the war in Afghanistan,Dexter DVD but in the history of that fundamental principle of the American republic, civil control of the military – Times readers have given their own Dexter Seasons 1-3 DVD boxsetjudgment, with a wave of responses that have come in to the paper’s Web site over the past 24 hoursDexter DVD

.

Within hoursDexter DVD

of the

Dexter DVD set White House announcement, more than 1,700 readers had responded to The Times’s account of the dismissal with their own comments; hundreds

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more have been coming in to this posting on the At War blog. The events at the

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White House on Wednesday seem to have touched just about every jangling nerve in the American body politic, and brought into sharper focus than ever before the doubt, frustration and anger that the “long war” against Islamic extremism has generated among Americans, who have paid by far the highest price, in military

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casualties and the trillion dollars or more in the war’s costs, of any of the foreign powers that have gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Answers: John Fisher Burns

Answers: Dexter Filkins

Not for the first time, I’m struck, reading the comments and questions, by the comprehensive grasp so many of our readers — and not just those with direct experience of the Afghan conflict, as soldiers and civilians — have of the issues, both those that have arisen from the general’s dismissal and from what the episode tells us about the war itself. In an otherwise deeply dispiriting moment,

Dexter DVD boxset that is something to celebrate: With all else that has gone wrong for America in recent years, in the wars and the economy at home, it has the enormous advantage, indispensable to the republic’s health, of a well-informed and active citizenry.

Still, it is daunting to have to field questions to which, in many cases, there are no ready answers, and worse, no reliable answers at all. For that reason, among others, I am very reassured to be joined in these responses by Dexter Filkins, my close “comrade in arms;” my bon copain, as the French would say, from the two wars. No reporter has spent more time in the combat zones than Dexter, and few, if any, have come to know the American commanders there — in particular General McChrystal and his successor as the commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus — any better.

Among his peers, Dexter, who is writing from Kabul, is regarded as one of the very best (some would say the best) of the band of brothers and sisters who have gone to war with their pens and notebooks, their flak jackets and helmets and R. M. Williams boots (from Australia, and by habit heavily scuffed; they are as indispensable to this generation of war correspondents and photographers as the dangling

DVD boxset cigarette was to the generation of Ernie Pyle). Between us, we will do our best to add what value we can to a debate that seems certain to run as long as the Afghan conflict continues, and surely for decades beyond.

In the interval between the first rush of reader responses to General McChrystal’s dismissal on Wednesday afternoon and the flow of comments that began coming into the At War site 12 hours later, there was a revealing shift; as more details of the episode became available, fewer of our readers seemed inclined to shoot the messenger, Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone, for the quotes from General McChrystal and his aides that cost the general his job. That may have been because readers learned, as the story unfolded, that General McChrystal had been given a chance to review his quotes and had not

Family Guy DVDprotested, at least in the account of Mr. Hastings and his editors.

If that is true, Dexter DVD boxset it becomes harder to make the case that Mr. Hastings betrayed the trust extended by the general and his staff in reporting the disparaging remarks – about Mr. Obama; Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones; and Richard C. Holbrooke,

Family Guy DVD boxsetthe administration’s

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special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, among others – that led to the general’s firing.