Oct 2nd, 2008 at 10:55 pm
The McClellan Factor
A lot of people are wondering who the “McClellan” character was that Sarah Palin was referring to, with many guessing that she’s been consulting long-dead failed Civil War General George McClellan for advice on Afghanistan. But another colleague suggested that she’s mentally combined General McKiernan, the commanding officer in Afghanistan, and David Kilcullen into a single ten-foot tall counterinsurgency superman.
50 Responses to “The McClellan Factor”
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October 2nd, 2008 at 10:58 pm
snap!
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:00 pm
If she recently saw “Hunt for Red October” it would have been McTiernan.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:02 pm
unrelated question. At one point palin was mentioning McCain’s bipartisan supporter. She mentioned Lieberman, Giuliani and Romney and the someone named I think lingell. Who is lingell?
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:03 pm
She was condescending to Joe Biden about Afghanistan and also completely wrong. McCain and Palin would like to take the “surge” brand and apply it to other conflicts and problems that we face, but the reality is that the same strategies which are being used in Iraq don’t make sense in Afghanistan.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Snap! Best snark of the night Mr. Yglesias. Thank you for that.
And yes, the night has been awash in snark.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:04 pm
His moustache is pretty mavericky though.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Who is lingell?
Lingle is a moderate Republican (pro choice, anti-tobacco, for example) and the current Governor of Hawaii.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:08 pm
People, people, people — she was mixing him up with Scotty.
Who in their right mind believes she knows the general in the Civil War?
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:11 pm
McClellan is actually point number one against this general-worship bullshit that the McCain people try and push with Patreus. If Lincoln had just acquiesced to McClellan, or continued to do so, as opposed to using his own judgment, the Civil War would have probably went on even longer with that bastard asking for even more troops. [Point number two is MacArthur in Korea). But, of course, all that history and crap just gets in the way of our military hero worship.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:13 pm
If you’re going to talk about successful US Army commanders, General George McClellan isn’t the one that comes to mind. Lincoln fired him largely for his tactical unwillingness to press the advantage.
Lincoln: “If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time.”
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:25 pm
He wasn’t quite so bad as he’s usually made out to be. He suffered from the Peter principle big-time. He was a disaster at his final job. Prior to that, he was decent with small units, and actually very good at building and training his army. He was so proud of it he didn’t want to get it dirty.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I don’t think one has to look that far: there was a McClellan all over the news (which Sarah Palin doesn’t read) not that long ago. She was confusing the Bush apostate with the Afghanistan general.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Well, she was arguing that McClellan was wrong. I think this was just an extension of McCain’s claim that we are all Georgians now.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:56 pm
McClellan was the original Petraeus.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:10 am
Actually, McClellan was sort of an anti-Petraeus. Per the account in Fiasco, Petraeus was one of the few ranking army officers in Iraq who actually understood how to fight an insurgency. Unfortunately, Bush only put him in charge to minimize casualties and political damage from the 2006 elections and because he was, for all his contrary opinions, a pretty good kiss-up.
McClellan had no clue how to fight the war he was in and quarreled with Lincoln and Stanton, his civilian bosses, at every opportunity, insulting them many, many times before Lincoln ran out of patience and fired his worthless behind.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:18 am
And, just for the record, Palin was wrong and Gen. McKiernan did in fact say that a surge strategy will not work in Afghanistan.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:29 am
One other Palin gaffe I noticed that no one else seems to be commenting on:
She very clearly said something about keeping the Toxic Waste on Main Street from infecting Wall Street. At least one other time she reversed the two items she was comparing and said something embarrassing.
Obviously these were just moments where she misspoke… no more indicative of stupidity than a Matt Yglesias homophone error. But funny nonetheless. I hope someone with Tivo is putting together a greatest hits collection. Palin did much better than the Couric interview, but she still managed to say a very lange number of dumb things.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:40 am
Well sure, but McLellan didn’t. Waddya say to that, smart guy?
October 3rd, 2008 at 1:06 am
Is anyone really following Afghanistan? Afghanistan is eight shades of fucked, you can tell NATO to go home, you could increase ground forces, you can do whatever you want and that place is done.
Everyone to a man (and woman to the extent that matters) hates Karzai. Worse, they hate the idea of democracy. Not because they are a nation of totalitarians, but their limited experience with it produced a parliament of warlords and thieves. Everyone there knows it. Illiterate villagers know that Karzai’s brother is a massive drug smuggler and arms dealer who doesn’t hold anything against the Taliban when it comes to making a deal.
October 3rd, 2008 at 1:16 am
The parallels are scary.
A dead guy is running our foreign war.
October 3rd, 2008 at 1:42 am
Possibly her earpiece was not as clear as she would have liked.
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:54 am
But Biden called Bosnian Muslims “Bosniaks”!
Oh, wait. They actually are called Bosniaks.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200810030001
I had a moment like Cokie Roberts’s a few months back when I almost emailed the NYT to say that their Cyrillic-alphabet front-page rubric “Russian readers respond” ignorantly said “Rossiskie chitateli otvechayut” instead of “Russkie chitateli otvechayut”. As it turns out Russia officially started calling its citizens “Rossiskie” instead of “Russkie” a few years ago. Part of the whole feudal-chic thing that goes along with rehabilitating the Tsar.
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:22 am
Who in their right mind believes she knows the general in the Civil War?
She’s a secessionist. Of course she knows civil war generals. Probably has a chess set with them.
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:34 am
No wonder Biden seemed confused. She was so confident in her response on that one, too.
I’m waiting for someone to write about them “agreeing” about same-sex marriages. Smells fishy…
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:57 am
Ed is right – Afghanistan is already over, the morons at the Pentagon and the White House just don’t care because the money continues to flow to their backers in the military-industrial complex.
Anyone with any common sense and everyone with any concept of counterinsurgency or military matters outside the Pentagon who has looked at Afghanistan knows perfectly well the war is lost. Totally and completely lost.
Even Cordesman, who has been sucking for some time now, just wrote a long piece pointing out how nothing has been done right in Afghanistan.
Why the US is losing in Afghanistan
By Anthony H Cordesman
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JJ01Df02.html
He goes on to provide a long list of failures by the US to fund and operate a cohesive strategy. What he DOES NOT do is recognize that the job really was impossible from the beginning given the nature and history of that country. And that therefore there should never have been an invasion of Afghanistan, an overthrow of the Taliban, and that Al
Qaeda should have been dealt with as a law enforcement and
counterintelligence issue, not a military one.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:33 am
What he DOES NOT do is recognize that the job really was impossible from the beginning given the nature and history of that country. And that therefore there should never have been an invasion of Afghanistan, an overthrow of the Taliban, and that Al Qaeda should have been dealt with as a law enforcement and counterintelligence issue, not a military one.
I dunno about your first couple of points. Taliban managed to mostly hold afghanistan given economic and military aid from pakistan. If we’d given the Northern Alliance a reasonable level of economic and military supplies and that was enough for them to hold Afghanistan, I see no particular reason why we shouldn’t have. Or maybe a quick invasion with us supporting the NA guys with airstrikes and such, maybe catch Bin Ladin, then we pull out and give economic and military supplies to the NA guys as long as they look viable.
If Taliban successfully came back then OK, all is forgiven, we taught them a lesson once and if we needed to we could teach them another one.
I think we should have been slower to invade. Give them time to decide what to do about Bin Ladin. We got inside their OODA loop, they couldn’t have decided to give him up that quick if they were going to. If we gave them time and the result was that Bin Ladin left afghanistan and went somewhere else, we would have been better off. Practically anyplace is better to hunt Bin Ladin than there. I agree with you about it being an international police matter.
But invading afghanistan is not so bad. There’s some expense and some killing involved, but lots of people have done it successfully. The hard part comes when you think you own afghanistan and try to govern it. That one trips up native-born afghans pretty often, and they’re experts at it. Better to leave it to them.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:44 am
@jmscher
I thought the same thing. I bet she meant to say “Lindsay Graham” but couldn’t read the handwriting of whoever provided her notes and just merged the names together to get “Lingle.”
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:44 am
If Lincoln had just acquiesced to McClellan, or continued to do so, as opposed to using his own judgment, the Civil War would have probably went on even longer with that bastard asking for even more troops.
McClellan is usually regarded by contemprary historians as simply a general with limited capacity–good at training troops, a decent strategist, a hopeless tactician, and no fighting spirit. Many of his contemporaries, however, thought that the problem was that he was a Democrat, an anti-abolitionist, and politically ambitious. He was accused, with considerable reason, of having deliberately failed to support a rival general, causing the Union disaster at 2nd Bull Run . . .
Allow for the shift in parties–today McClellan would be a Republican, with his politics and his background as a corporate CEO–he’s just the kind of guy that would find a high position in a McCain/Palin administration.
October 3rd, 2008 at 9:22 am
McClellan may have had his problems as a general, but he was an expert at managing railroads. So maybe our host should put in a good word for him.
October 3rd, 2008 at 11:42 am
McClellan must be the Israeli General that kicked Hezb’allah out of Lebanon.
Biden fabricates entire military campaigns and you hit Palin for mixing up a name. Well, anything that pays the rent I guess.
October 3rd, 2008 at 1:34 pm
McClellan won the battle of Antietam, which led directly to the Emancipation Proclamation, the single most important action the North performed to win the War. He also played a critical role in turning the Army of the Potomac into an army that could compete with the Army of Northern Virginia. He was too cautious, but he was not a “failed” general, and was far superior to Mcdowell,Pope,Burnside, and Hooker.
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:58 pm
McClellan won the battle of Antietam, which led directly to the Emancipation Proclamation, the single most important action the North performed to win the War. He also played a critical role in turning the Army of the Potomac into an army that could compete with the Army of Northern Virginia. He was too cautious, but he was not a “failed” general, and was far superior to Mcdowell,Pope,Burnside, and Hooker.
McClellan was far worse than any of those four because he failed completely to understand the political basis of the war and refused to play his role as military commander of the nations largest army. He thoroughly bungled the Antietam campaign. Lee’s invasion was repelled only because the rest of the union army wasn’t as incompentent or cowardly as McClellan, because McClellan was constantly pressed by Lincoln and Stanton to move and act, and because Lee’s army was hopelessly outnumbered and he let it be hemmed in by mountains and rivers, taking away his advantage of maneuverability.
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Thomas: That’s what I mean. There was no need to invade Afghanistan, then try to “nation build”. And that basically means there was really no need to “invade” at all.
If we could have supplied the Northern Alliance, let THEM get bin Laden if they could or would. If we could get bin Laden at all, then go in and get him and get out without even engaging the Taliban. Or as the Taliban offered, provide them with the evidence and let them either try him or turn him over. We didn’t bother because the real goal was to get a pipeline and restart the heroin traffic for the CIA’s benefit while making it look like we were “doing something” about “terrorism” – which was just the cover story.
There simply was no need to overthrow the Taliban – they were not the problem.
October 6th, 2008 at 3:13 am
A more likely reason is that she is confusing him with Scott McClellan, Bush’s former press secretary.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:39 am
No – Palin was tutored by ideologues who have a particualar loathing of McClellan for not attacking the south.
She just got confused/
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