Elegy to General McChrystal: Reining in “Kurtz”

Martha K. Huggins, PhD*

American media have likened General McChrystal’s Afghan War boys’ night out barroom critiques of US Afghan policy, to Douglas McArthur’s defiance of President Truman’s Korea/China policy. General MacArthur is not the model for McChrystal’s transgressions; it is “Kurtz,” the ‘gone-rogue’ Joseph Conrad figure, who metamorphosed in Apocalypse Now as Marlon Brando’s “Colonel Kurtz,” a US Army Special Operations Officer who goes mad acting outside military bureaucracy. In Apocalypse Now, Special OPS “Captain Willard” is dispatched to assassinate “Kurtz.”

In a twist of this theme, President Obama selected a “Kurtz” figure, who had been part of an elite assassination team to direct the Afghan war. McChrystal has been let go for ‘national security’ reasons: His conduct - often in the darkest shadows of ‘military and civilian control’ - is said to undermine “civilian control of the military.”

Could a ‘Black Ops’ military man, who has commanded a US-government death squad (“Task-force 6-26”) - assigned to assassinate high level al-Qa’ida operatives (accomplishing this for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) - be expected to operate within the very civil and military bureaucracies that spawned his top-secret ‘off-the-shelf’ operations? Can a presidential administration claiming a commitment to greater governmental transparency - including ending back-room torture - really be surprised when a military man who headed an interrogation cell dubbed by Newsweek, “the most secretive force in the US Military,” goes it alone? Such organizations and their legitimated actions--carried out by authorized civilian and military operatives--undermines democratic governance.

McChrystal’s aides’ drink-loosened talk against US Executive-level civil and military functionaries is to be expected: “Kurtz,” allowed to be a ‘rogue’ operator, continued to go it alone! This should have been clear to the Commander-in-Chief when he appointed General McChrystal to command US/NATO military operations in Afghanistan. President Obama surely recognizes that a “Kurtz” cannot be reined in, a fact that has served several presidential administrations as long as their “Kurtz” operatives remained in the shadows. McChrystal failed to serve when, as “boys-being-boys,” they kicked down drinks with a reporter, turning a French bar into war-torn Saigon’s Rex Hotel “follies.”

*Charles and Leo Favrot Professor of Human Relations, Tulane University, New Orleans