Twitter This Commentary In The News: Thanks this morning to ChrisM, my MP3Angel, for supplying the commentary audio file.

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Update: McChrystal is OUT! The guy who used black masked US soldiers (JSOC) to commandeer Iraq's elections by assassinations and thuggery for the Bush Administration said:

This morning the President accepted my resignation as Commander of U.S. and NATO Coalition Forces in Afghanistan. I strongly support the President’s strategy in Afghanistan and am deeply committed to our coalition forces, our partner nations, and the Afghan people. It was out of respect for this commitment — and a desire to see the mission succeed — that I tendered my resignation. It has been my privilege and honor to lead our nation’s finest. [Source]

He has been replaced by General David Petraeus

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General Stanley McChrystal and the president of the United States have been meeting at the White House to discuss the relationship between the civilian government of the U.S. and it's military. The Rolling Stone article that started this historic flap is here. Stan Goff, Feral Scholar and EX-JSOC operator puts it this way: (Unfamiliar with the acronym JSOC? Stan has a good writeup here)

WARNING. McChrystal, his cohort, and the author are macho shit-heads. This article - read too often - could cause brain damage.

‘How’d I get screwed into going to this dinner?” demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It’s a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He’s in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany’s president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

[source]

Meanwhile, Juan Cole at Informed Comment says: "McChrystal Drama is Sideshow; Can Obama define a realistic Goal?", and describes just how bad the situation is on the ground:

Adding to the sense of McChrystal’s career possibly crashing and burning is the report from Matthew Green of the Financial Times in Marjah [scroll down] that US special envoy Richard Holbrooke and Ambassador in Kabul Karl Eikenberry visited Marjah on Monday and met with local elders to the sound of small arms fire in the background. (H/t to Michael Pollack for the link and his comments). Then as Holbrooke and Eikenberry were leaving the meeting site, a bomb went off, which apparently had been intended for them on the part of three suicide bombers but detonated prematurely at a local shop. The purpose of the visit was for Holbrooke to assess how well McChrystal’s counter-insurgency doctrine was going in Marjah. The local elders said that the Marines had improved security in some areas but not others. One said he had to travel to the meeting secretly for fear of Taliban reprisals. When the US special envoy and ambassador can’t visit a place in a country without hearing small arms fire or risking being a bombing target, I’d say security is not good there. On Monday and Tuesday, 14 NATO troops were killed, ten of them on Monday alone. Two of those killed Tuesday were American troops. So far in June, 69 NATO troops have been killed, 43 of them American. [In full, with linkage to pertinent articles]

There has been a court-ordered injunction on the offshore drilling ban by a federal judge who possesses an investment portfolio of energy industry stocks. Secretary of the Interior Salazar says he will put a moratorium in place immediately after the judge ruled that drilling in the Gulf of Mexico can resume. Meanwhile:

Forty miles off the Louisiana coast, on the north end of the Chandeleur Islands, a sand dredge sat idled late on Tuesday after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ordered operators to stop building new sand barrier islands. [More from Reuters]

The fellow from Colorado picked up in the Pakistani hinterlands on a personal hunt for Osama bin Laden has been released by the Pakistanis. No word on whether he will be allowed to continue his 'hunt' or be deported. Bulgaria is sending 65 more soldiers to Afghanistan, 20 of whom will be medical and other non-combat personnel, bringing their troop commitment to 627. Meanwhile, two more US soldiers have been killed. Keep repeating it as if true: "There's no such thing as global climate change..." - The waters off the shores of California and Oregon are still way below normal temperatures and no one claims to know why. It has caused massive fog banks to develop off the Northern West Coast. -30-
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