This is something that I’ve been seeing in emails and in other people’s comment threads, and since right now I have nothing more useful to offer I thought I might as well say: No, McChrystal did not say all that stuff to Michael Hastings and Rolling Stone because he was trying to get fired as a way of not going down with the Afghanistan-strategy ship. I have independent reason to believe this and that’s all I’ll say.

But by far the simplest explanation is the one that’s staring everyone in the face. McChrystal fucked up. He fucked up! He said he fucked up. Check out Gates’s ultra-Gates-like inscrutable statement leaving McChrystal to twist in the wind in advance of tomorrow’s White House. The guy knows he fucked up. The question is why. And here I’ll take one on the chin: I thought that the post-IISS speech media narrative of “McChrystal versus Obama” was media manufactured. I still think that was the case. But one consequence of excusing McChrystal’s comments — and Bernard Finel, this is me giving you your due here — was to inadvertently diminish the consequences of McChrystal not rowing in the same direction as the rest of the team. That lassitude allows arrogance and miscalculation to fester, and that’s on display in McChrystal’s Rolling Stone remarks, and I sure as hell hope it’s not a metaphor for the entire strategy.