I’m off in the woods where the silence is mostly broken by birds and rushing rivers.  The explosion of McChrystal’s bombshell remarks barely reach here however loud they are exploding in D.C., Kabul and elsewhere around the world.  I’d have to say, as a former Navy p.r. junior officer that his own “a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened” barely covers it.   Here is  some of the opinionist coverage:

Spencer Ackerman:

The amazing thing about it is there’s no complaints from McChrystal or his staff about the administration on any substantive ground. After all, McChrystal and his allies won the argument within the White House. All the criticisms — of Eikenberry, of Jones, of Holbrooke, of Biden — are actually just immature and arrogant snipes at how annoying Team America (what, apparently, McChrystal’s crew calls itself) finds them. This is not mission-first, to say the least. In fact, you have to go deep in the piece to find soldiers and officers offering actual critiques — and what they offer is criticism of McChrystal for being insufficiently brutal.

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Duncan Boothby, McChrystal’s  “senior media aide” has resigned [apparently for gross incompetence....]

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Juan Cole:

President Obama absolutely must fire McChrystal for insubordination. You can’t have the office of the vice presidency disrespected in public by a general in uniform that way. Nor is it plausible that the Obama team has a prayer of getting Afghanistan right, assuming such a thing is possible, if the commanding military officer and the ambassador are feuding like the Baizai and the Ranizai.

Obama has largely misunderstood the historical moment in the US. He appears to have thought that we wanted a broker, someone who could get everyone together and pull off a compromise that led to a deal among the parties. We don’t want that. We want Harry Truman. We want someone who will give them hell. We don’t want him to say one day that Wall Street is making obscene profits when the rest of the country suffers, then the next day say that the brokers deserve their bonuses. We don’t want him to mollify Big Oil one day then bash it the next. More consistent giving of hell, please.

If Obama doesn’t fire McChrystal, he will never be respected by anybody in the chain of command that leads to his desk. Moreover, moving McChrystal out now would be a perfect opportunity to pull the plug on the impractical counter-insurgency campaign that the latter has been pursuing, which probably has only a 10% chance of success. (A RAND study found that where a government that claimed to be a democracy actually was not, and where it faced an insurgency, it prevailed only 10% of the time. Sounds like President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan to me.)

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Robert Greenwald: McChrystal Must Resign

For insubordination, for disrespecting the Office of the President of the United States and for allowing derision of the White House among his staff, General Stanley McChrystal must resign.

McChrystal has been summoned from Afghanistan to explain derisive comments and insubordination detailed in a new Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings. As detailed in the article, the general and his staff were clearly disrespectful of the office of the president, as well as contemptuous of the civilian leadership of our country. McChrystal’s behavior and his toleration of similar behavior from his staff breeds an attitude of contempt for civilian leadership among his officers, and no Commander-in-Chief should tolerate it. McChrystal should resign, and the president should accept his resignation.

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Joe Klein in an otherwise fully admiring take on McChrystal

The lack of discipline and the disrespect he has shown his Commander-in-Chief are very much at odds with military tradition and practice.

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Don’t forget this: Sam Stein at HuffPo on a Krakauer take on McChrystal:

McChrystal was the head of Special Operations command in Afghanistan during Army Ranger (and former football star) Pat Tillman’s death. McChrystal was the one who approved paperwork awarding Tillman a Silver Star despite knowing (or at least suspecting) that he had died in fratricide and not, as originally determined, enemy fire.

Krakauer: …he just said now he didn’t read this hugely important document about the most famous soldier in the military. He didn’t read it carefully enough to notice that it talked about enemy fire instead of friendly fire? That’s preposterous. That, that’s not believable.