The Beauty of Discomfort by Amanda Lang

Author:Amanda Lang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2017-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that three years after McChrystal arrived in Baghdad, the Americans found themselves spinning around underwater without regulators or oxygen tanks. By 2006, according to the New York Times, the situation in Iraq had descended into “cataclysm” and the country was in the throes of a bloody civil war. “A thousand civilians were dying every month” because al-Qaeda gunmen and suicide bombers were massacring Shiite civilians, and the Shiite militias were massacring young Sunni men.

By the end of 2007, after McChrystal’s commandos conducted a series of operations, the situation had changed dramatically. Many reputable news organizations, typically stingy with praise when it comes to military invasions, lauded McChrystal’s achievements in Iraq. CNN’s national security analyst credited him with transforming and modernizing the JSOC into a “force of unprecedented agility and lethality.” Esquire echoed the compliment and specifically praised the June 2006 targeted killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (who’d headed al-Qaeda in Iraq since 2004) “using a virtuoso combination of signals intelligence, . . . human intelligence, . . . interrogation (the best of the best, drawn from government, the military, and the private sector), and special ops.” The magazine also quoted an ex-Ranger, whom it identified as a leading expert on counter-insurgency. He argued that the turnaround was accomplished not by the 2007 deployment of more than twenty thousand additional soldiers, but rather “by the elite killers of JSOC—as led by Stan McChrystal.”

The impact of his leadership can be measured in other ways too. In December 2006, there were more than 140 suicide bombings in Baghdad; in December 2007, there were just five. According to one retired lieutenant colonel of the elite British Special Air Service, “General McChrystal delivered that statistic.” He raised the “hard, nasty business” of counterterrorism—of “black ops”—to an industrial scale, with ten nightly raids throughout the city, or three hundred a month. And apparently, the general regularly joined these raids himself. Then there was his openness to bringing in a new kind of operative: the computer geek. Rolling Stone reported that McChrystal “systematically mapped out terrorist networks, targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down—often with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally shunned by the military.” A special forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq told a reporter, “The Boss would find the 24-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some fucking brilliant degree from MIT, sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors humming . . . [and] say, ‘Hey—you fucking muscleheads couldn’t find lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.’”

McChrystal’s record in Iraq was not unblemished. According to a report released by Human Rights Watch in 2006, detainees at Camp Nama—a unit under his command—“were regularly stripped naked, subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme cold, placed in painful stress positions, and beaten.” McChrystal was also criticized for personally signing off on a Silver Star recommendation for former NFL football player Pat Tillman, who was killed in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in April 2004.

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