McChrystal: “I’ve compromised the mission”; Update: McChrystal misses strategy session? Update: “We are so screwed”

Will General Stanley McChrystal keep his job or won’t he?  And what will that say about the Obama administration either way?  We will have to wait until after a mid-morning tete-a-tete between the theater commander and his Commander-in-Chief this morning, but that won’t keep people from reading the tea leaves.  Jake Tapper reports on McChrystal’s efforts to show remorse in an attempt to keep his job:

During his round of phone calls to top officials of the Obama administration whom he and his team disparaged to a Rolling Stone reporter, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, “I’ve compromised the mission,” a senior administration source tells ABC News.

Whether he did so irrevocably is at the top of the agenda in his Oval Office meeting with President Obama this morning. The president will press him as to what he was thinking and whether he still has the ability to serve as commander of 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan after making remarks about the president and his national security team that the general could use to justifiably fire any of his underlings if they were made about him.

Tapper also points out the Catch-22 of making a show of abject humility:

But if McChrystal by his own admission has compromised the mission, where does that leave him?

It’s a good question.  If McChrystal is perceived to have fouled up the mission, he will return in a weakened position, somewhat the same as McChrystal described Richard Holbrooke’s situation in that Rolling Stone interview.  Hamid Karzai yesterday issued a strong statement of support for McChrystal, calling him the best American commander in the last nine years in Afghanistan.  Will his NATO colleagues feel the same, especially the French, whose social and diplomatic efforts were derided by McChrystal’s team in the article as “f***ing gay”?  Or will he be seen as too tightly leashed to the White House now for any reliable independent judgment?

Barack Obama may have another problem on his hands — his own party.  According to Ben Smith at Politico on Twitter, Democrats are telling him sotto voce that keeping McChrystal in place would make Obama another Jimmy Carter.  And then there’s this from Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:

Only two words were missing from this disembowelment of the commander: You’re fired. Gibbs hinted that Obama would deliver that message to McChrystal in person on Wednesday. If he doesn’t, it’s hard to see how he can maintain his credibility as a leader.

Even before the quotes in the Rolling Stone article (the accuracy of which McChrystal hasn’t challenged), the commander in chief had surprised foes and worried friends by how far he allowed himself to be pushed. That accounts for an Washington Post-ABC News poll earlier this month finding that 57 percent of respondents viewed Obama as a strong leader and 43 percent did not; 14 months ago, it was 77 percent to 22 percent.

On the Hill, Democrats have ignored White House pleas for party unity, and intraparty disputes are preventing action on the budget, war spending, job creation, immigration reform and energy legislation. In the media, stalwart allies such as MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow panned Obama’s speech on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Obama’s own secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, told the world about his unannounced plan to file suit over Arizona’s new immigration law.

Republicans, in turn, have reached new levels of presidential disrespect. After Obama pushed BP to set aside money for those hurt by the oil spill, the opposition apologized — to BP. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, took the extraordinary step of attacking Obama at a political rally over comments he says (and the White House denies) the president made in a private meeting.

OMG!!!  Republicans criticized the President!  It’s a “new level of presidential disrespect,” but only if you were in a coma from 2000-2009.  The meeting between Kyl and Obama may not have had the press in the room, but Kyl has no requirement to consider Obama’s statements on policy as off the record.  Note also that Milbank doesn’t mention the fact that John McCain — hardly a foe of comprehensive immigration reform — corroborated Kyl’s statement.  Milbank seems to be in the middle of a hysterical meltdown over the fact that people don’t much like Obama or the job he’s doing, and suddenly after eight years of people deriding George Bush as a chimp, another Hitler, an idiot, and a corruptocrat, Milbank is shocked, shocked to hear disagreement on policy and considers it the nadir of public discourse.

The President’s party will write him off as a leader if he doesn’t cashier McChrystal.  Will that make any difference in Obama’s decision-making process?  I’d say no, especially since these are mainly the same people who don’t want us to stay in Afghanistan anyway.  That doesn’t mean that Obama won’t fire McChrystal, either, but either way Obama will pay a political price.

The issue will probably come down to how true McChrystal’s admission is.  If he has really compromised the mission, then it’s time to go, and McChrystal should resign instead of forcing Obama to fire him.  If Obama thinks McChrystal’s doing a good job (which is hotly debated at the moment anyway) and feels he can continue to work with the commander even after the childish and reprehensible remarks McChrystal and his team felt comfortable making in public, then Obama will probably stick with him.  I predict that McChrystal returns to Afghanistan, if for no other reason than to avoid another confirmation hearing on his replacement and the questions that will arise from it.

Update: Jules Crittenden says this is Obama’s chance to finally become a war President rather than a wartime President.  Be sure to read it all.

Update II: Wire services now report that McChrystal left the White House at 10:30 ET, and apparently did not return for an 11:30 ET strategy session on the war.  That looks as though McChrystal got his walking papers.

Update III: That appears to be the analysis of McChrystal’s supporters at the Pentagon, according to McClatchy:

The mood among McChrystal’s supporters at the Pentagon as he walked out the White House was despondent, especially given the relatively short length of his meeting with the president. Some then began questioning whether the military can succeed in Afghanistan. Many here were convinced that McChrystal was irreplaceable and one of the best counterinsurgency experts the military has. “We are screwed,” said one military officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the highly sensitive nature of the developments, as he watched the images of McChrystal leaving the White House. “We are so screwed.”

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