I don't know that I like this song

Roy Zimmerman released this one today as appropriate to the dissent at the top in the conduct of the war in Afghanistan.

I have to applaud Rolling Stone for exposing the chaos in leadership in the war.

The Rolling Stone article highlights how President Obama has long had an even bigger decision to make. His Afghan team is widely regarded as dysfunctional. There is an astonishing web of animosities and rivalries between key civilian and military players.

McChrystal comes off as an honest — too honest — jerk who is so arrogant that he doesn't care that the follies of the conduct of war are being exposed. It's the kind of incompetence at diplomacy that make his firing righteous…but still, I'm so tired of our government lying about the state of the war in Afghanistan.

More worrying for American readers will be a passage in the article where Gen McChrystal visits a detachment of US soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan.

One of their number has been killed by a booby-trap bomb in an old house.

The local commander had asked permission several times to demolish the house to eradicate the risk to his men, but Gen McChrystal's own rules of engagement mean that permission was denied.

When the general asks the soldiers if they think they are losing, one of them tells him that some of them do.

I really don't like that song because one of my boys has elected to join the army, and is in basic training right now; he might well end up in this wretched war. I don't want him or anyone to be the last man; I don't want any Afghan citizens harmed in this futile exercise which isn't likely to end happily for anyone. I don't need reminders that we're going to be heartsick with worry for a few years.

At least the song is protesting the war. I look at our leadership and feel only disappointment that Obama has increased our commitment to this nightmare, along with his pathetic efforts on domestic issues, and the only thing keeping me from disgust at having voted for him is the fact that our alternative was far, far worse.