The clock is ticking

Karl Munchausen left a comment about this great blog widget he came up with. Unfortunately, it's too wide for the side bar of my blog template, so I'll just put it in a post until he can come up a smaller one (200 pixels wide would be just about right, Karl!).

Update: Karl e-mailed me to let me know he's got a second, narrower version of the widget up now. Run along now and get one for your blog, too!

Uh-oh: McChrystal may resign over Obama's "dithering"?

A pissing contest between General Stanley McChrystal and President Obama is about to become very public. McChrystal has had a report ready to go to the White House since late August in which he'll recommend a significant increase in troop levels in Afghanistan, but the Obama administration doesn't want to see the report. Not yet, anyway.

According to Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal, McChrystal is prepared to resign his post if the administration won't listen to him:

Within 24 hours of the leak of the Afghanistan assessment to The Washington Post, General Stanley McChrystal's team fired its second shot across the bow of the Obama administration. According to McClatchy, military officers close to General McChrystal said he is prepared to resign if he isn't given sufficient resources (read "troops") to implement a change of direction in Afghanistan...

Roggio quotes a McClatchy article, which includes this bit from SecDef Robert Gates:

On Thursday, Gates danced around the question of when the administration would be ready to receive McChrystal's request, which was completed in late August. "We're working through the process by which we want that submitted," he said.

Er...what? Working through the process of submitting a report? This ain't that hard, guys. The report's done, all you have to do is ask for it. Unless, that is, you're fully aware of what's in the report and you know the clock will start ticking on making a decision on the recommendations and they're decisions you don't really want to make because you campaigned on the premise that Afghanistan was the "good" war that must be won at all costs and now public sentiment is shifting away from that.

Yeah, that's intentionally a run-on sentence. Get over it.