One of the greatest challenges America faces at the moment is our inability to tell the difference between what makes news and what really matters.

Not only is this week's "big story" in Washington -- the Rolling Stone-assisted career suicide of General Stanley McChrystal -- not actually an important story, it's not even the most important national security story of the week. It's not even the most important story about a key general quitting this administration at a vital moment in a badly bungled struggle.

In fact, in the botched coverage of the McChrystal hullaballoo I see not just one but six degrees of wrong.

1. First, we have had most of the media coverage devoted to the soap opera elements of this story. The President vs. His Hand-picked Battlefield Commander. The inviolability of the chain of command vs. McChrystal's perverse compulsion to bare his soul in a magazine whose cover features Lady Gaga doing something similar while wielding a couple of deadly weapons in a manner not recommended in any army training manual. Problem is, of course, this is superficial personality stuff that pales in comparison to the real story about Afghanistan.


2. That real story was nailed in a particularly incisive piece by Tom Friedman in yesterday's New York Times in which he smartly sidestepped the hubbub that was mesmerizing the cablerati and pointed out that it doesn't really matter who is in command of our Afghan folly, our "only real choices are lose early, lose late, lose big or lose small." If McChrystal and literally every other senior official involved in the Afghan effort feels making significant progress will take more time (a decade more) and money (hundreds of billions more) than the American people or the President or the Congress are willing to spend then the issue is not who is commanding on the ground but when they are going to supervise our ignominious withdrawal...and when and how the bad guys will capitalize on that.


3. Of course, in terms of our national security interests in the Middle East, what happens in Afghanistan is trumped by what is happens in Pakistan... and that in turn could well be soon trumped by the consequences of Iran's run at being a nuclear power. Thus shifting Petraeus from CENTCOM to Afghanistan reflects what could be seen in retrospect as a politically motivated strategic misstep - focusing on covering the president's behind on a signature initiative instead of addressing more significant threats. And the even bigger problem with the Middle East is our dependence on the region's oil ... and here we have this amazing reality that there is an oil-related crisis in this country that could be driving real moves toward reform and all we are getting are half-hearted, half-steps in the direction of the new energy policy we desperately need.


4. As big as the story of our political leadership's unwillingness to mount a credible offensive on the energy front is, even that story of the week is not as significant in terms of our national security as our continuing unwillingness to address the debt bomb that lies ticking ominously at the foundation of our economy. For this reason the really important resignation of the week was not McChrystal, it was that of budget chief Peter Orszag. In speaking to senior administration economic officials, whatever the official story is there seems to be a sense that at least in part the OMB chief is heading for the exit because he worries that the efforts to confront the deficit will be postponed or sub-optimal.


5. They'll find someone to run OMB, naturally. It's a little worrisome that the choices currently being bruited about are talented folks but not specialists in getting things done on Capitol Hill, which is where the real heavy lifting will be needed. Proof of that - and of the utter gutless, visionlessness of the Congressional leadership -- came this week as House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced that they would not seek a budget via traditional channels this year, suggesting a mid-term election year dodge to avoid having to address the real issues associated with starting to reduce the threats to America's future represented by big deficits and even bigger "off balance sheet" and "phantom balance sheet" real and likely obligations. (See my FT piece last week on this phenomenon - and in the last category consider that among other things the Federal government may soon find itself in the position of having to bail out public pension funds that are currently underfunded to the tune of something like a trillion dollars. Just to pick one particularly worrisome illustration as to why this problem is bigger than just the very very big federal deficit.)


6. And if you thought that expecting politicians to actually lead themselves was too much to ask then all you had to do this week was to look to the United Kingdom where the fledgling government of David Cameron had the genuine political courage to introduce a budget ... after just weeks in office and with a coalition government ... that proposed 25 percent cuts in British public spending. I was no fan of Cameron and I am still a skeptic ... but this was a courageous political move that should be seen by Americans as a sign both of what is possible and what will be required of whoever genuinely cares about American leadership and national security.

I've noticed an interesting pattern in my e-mails over the last 24 hours regarding the question of whether McChrystal should be fired. That is, the more someone knows about the military, the more likely they are to call for his removal. Political types, by contrast, don't see what the big deal is.

I have been particularly struck by a couple of hard-right types I know who are retired senior officers. For them, this is a matter of good order and discipline. If you allow a general to bitch-slap an uncertain president, how do you keep the troops in line?  

A follow-on musing on the McChrystal story...

How could he be so dumb? That question has nagged at me ever since I read the original story. McChrystal already knew that the White House thought he undermined them in public last fall (he didn't, really, but they thought he did); and he already knew that his boss was very thin-skinned. How then, could he get himself in this situation?

I think I have figured it out. If you read the Rolling Stone article carefully, you can see that the reporter, Michael Hastings, has woven three stories together. One story is the story of General McChrystal trying to keep up morale in a tough war with his troops thinking he is too worried about civilian casualties and he is forcing them to accept too many risks as consequence. This is also the story of McChrystal feeling under time pressure from Washington. I bet this is the story Hastings pitched to McChrystal's staff and the story McChrystal thought was being reported. It is, indeed, sprinkled throughout the Rolling Stone article, and in this thread McChyrstal is pretty careful about what he says and generally comes off pretty well.

The second story is Hastings's rather tendentious reporting on what McChrystal's enemies and critics say against him -- their complaints, and their doubts about the war. While assessing reporter's motivations is always a dodgy business, I suspect that this is the story Hastings pitched to his editor. The whole thing has the feel of a hungry guy hoping to hunt a big trophy kill: taking down a four-star hero and showing that his war plan (note how Hastings describes the strategy as McChrystal's, not the president's) is fatally flawed and doomed to failure.

If those were the only two stories in the article, people would only be talking about the Rolling Stone cover. The problem for McChrystal is that there is a third story woven through the article. This is the story of McChrystal and his staff on an unexpected layover in Paris when a plane is grounded because of the volcano. This part of the story has a "weekend in Vegas" feel to it. The staff get drunk. The French get dissed. Holbrooke gets dissed. McChrystal and his staff joke about how they would answer a tough question about Vice President Biden's theories about the war. Without having access to Hastings' notes, I can't be sure, but I am willing to wager that 95 percent of the really objectionable material comes from that layover.

This third story was an accident - serendipity for the reporter and a train-wreck for McChrystal.  The underlying facts are not surprising or accidental at all. Anyone who has interacted with the military, especially the special ops community from which McChrystal hails, will recognize the swagger. More to the point, we have known for over a year that Obama's national security team is plagued with serious internal bickering and that many of the principals, and especially the staffs, do not like each other. In short, it is not surprising that they talked this way. The only surprising bit is that McChrystal and his staff talked this way in front of a reporter, though less surprising when you factor in the "sailors on unexpected shore leave" aspect.

Now, of course, none of this excuses McChrystal's behavior, nor the more egregious behavior and comments of his staff. There is no "what happens in Paris, stays in Paris exception" to civil-military relations. Clearly, he allowed an unhealthy command climate to percolate and then bubble to the surface in unguarded moments. And it was reckless in the extreme to talk this way in front of a reporter who clearly was on a scalp-hunt (giving this particular reporter this much access was a monumental blunder and the person responsible was the first casualty of the day). Those are mistakes enough to justify McChrystal submitting his resignation, though I am not sure accepting it is the right call for the President. Civil-military norms demand better behavior from senior commanders.

But I think I understand it a bit better now. A very sad episode, but a bit less mystifying than when I first encountered it.

File this under "statements that aren't helpful." Here's Afghan government spokesman Waheed Omar weighing in on the Stanley McChrystal flap:

The president believes that Gen. McChrystal is the best commander that NATO and coalition forces have had in Afghanistan over the past nine years."

That's a nice compliment for McChrystal, but it's also a back-handed slap at Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded the U.S.-led efforts in Afghanistan for 18 months in 2006 and 2007.

Eikenberry the current U.S. ambassador in Kabul, isn't impressed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and said as much in a leaked memo that made McChrystal furious. In the Rolling Stone article, McChrystal says he felt "betrayed" by the memo, and accuses Eikenberry of "cover[ing] his flank for the history books." Omar's comments probably won't help the two men get along.