Barack Obama's firing of Stanley McChrystal showed weakness and will backfire.

Barack Obama's firing of Stanley McChrystal showed weakness and will backfire

He may have been hailed for his decisiveness, but Barack Obama sacked the wrong man and has yet to sort out his Afghanistan policy, writes Toby Harnden in Washington

Published: 4:37PM BST 26 Jun 2010

For the Washington cognoscenti, the appointment of General David Petraeusmarked the crescendo of President Barack Obama's Wonderful Week.

In firing General Stanley McChrystal, Mr Obama, the ultimate cool cat, was transformed into Mr Angry. The law professor finally became commander-in-chief.

Obama, so the Beltway groupthink goes, turned a lose-lose situation into a political victory by asserting his authority over an insubordinate steely-eyed killer and replacing him with the ultimate warrior-scholar. He showed the doubters he was tough, and he traded up.

How wrong the conventional wisdom can be. Obama's actions in dragging McChrystal back to Washington and personally sacking him in as dramatic a fashion as possible in fact displayed weakness.

It has not escaped the attention of the anti-war Left that although firing McChrystal was justified as a way of asserting civilian control over the military, the result is the opposite. Petraeus is a much more popular figure than Obama and has deeper ties across the full spectrum of the Washington establishment than any general since Colin Powell.

The reality is that Petraeus can pretty much do what he wants now.

So Obama would do well to avoid congratulating himself on winning last week's news cycle by brutally ending McChrystal's illustrious career.

He has further alienated the broader military constituency and done nothing to curtail the in-fighting among his top foreign policy officials.