During the Bush administration and the so-called revolt of the generals (the retired ones, mostly), the media were quick to praise public dissenters as lone wolves who spoke truth to power about the ineptness in Iraq. But it is not good when military officers go public with complaints about their civilian overseers. One of the great contributions of Matthew Ridgway to the war effort in Korea was that he stopped officers’ public sniping at the Truman policy, much of which he was probably in disagreement with. Later he aired his differences with Eisenhower, and paid a price, but in times of war, officers must make their views known through official (and thus private) channels, and may not freelance through the media. It was wrong during the furor over troop levels and the surge in Iraq, and it is wrong now. Generals provide input and can dissent privately, and then the president goes forward with the consensus and officers obey. Those who cannot do so in good conscience resign; those who choose to stay, but snipe to the media, at some point will have to. The system works, and when high-profile officers go to the media to undermine their overseers (e.g., George McClellan, Douglas MacArthur), it starts to unwind. As an aside, surely officers in Afghanistan should know that the purpose of Rolling Stone magazine is not to emphasize either their competency or their insight. And as a general rule, anytime a liberal journalist wishes to empathize with a frustrated officer, it is usually to exaggerate the officer’s unhappiness and use it for his own political purposes, which rarely if ever are those of the military. If an officer cannot figure out Rolling Stone, how can he understand the Taliban? UPDATE: At this early juncture, it is hard to get the full story (or to assess the degree to which the journalists involved were truthful), but so far the mess puts General Petraeus in a terrible fix, since his handpicked general will at some point have to resign. And when we factor in the mistake of setting deadlines for withdrawal, the failure to inspire our European allies to stay (they see us planning to leave), the growing mutual incrimination with the Karzai government, and popular rumbling about the restrictive rules of engagement, the Afghanistan theater is in real trouble. And this is the so-called good war that Bush ignored to fight the “bad” one in Iraq, where things are relatively quiet and a constitutional government, for all its problems, is now is in its seventh year of governance.