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Not many believed Barack Obama would sack the Afghanistan war general â€" but the US president was right to assert his authority

I didn't think Barack Obama would sack the Afghanistan war general, Stanley McChrystal, at this dangerous stage in a near-impossible war.

Nor did Michael Hastings, the author of the Rolling Stone article that caused McChrystal's downfall.

But Obama did sack him, as his White House hero, Abraham Lincoln, did in much greater peril. Good for him. Civilian control of the military â€" which usually hovers between impotence and impudence â€" is an important principle that has needed reinforcing from time to time down the centuries.

The alternative is the drift towards what is sometimes known as Caesarism â€" after the process's most famous exponent â€" military-led authoritarianism of the kind the Turks (among others) have been struggling to escape.

The label Bonapartism would serve just as well and, unlike most of their third-rate emulators, both eponymous tyrants were exceptional military commanders.

In our own time, America's "military industrial complex" â€" against which its last ex-military president, that fastidious, underrated moderate, Dwight D Eisenhower, warned â€" has got above itself in the decades of military failure since Ike stood down in 1961.

And, as Colin Powell discovered, but had the good sense to ignore, US public opinion has an unhealthy weakness for uniforms which, as Simon Tisdall notes in his glum assessment, Polarisation "War on Terror" in the Bush years has aggravated.

Fortunately, as Tisdall also notes, respectable people on the right have backed the president's proper assertion of his authority.

Hastings' article is a good read, because it tells us more than author or general probably intended â€" most conspicuously about the vanity of a clever, impatient man whose CV contains murky episodes (like the controversy surrounding the NFL star-turned-soldier Pat Tillman's friendly fire cover-up) as well as brilliant innovative successes.

Was collaboration with this article an accident, a car crash no one spotted? I'd say no â€" it was a cheerful act of insubordination by a general (the son of a general, too) who, writes Hastings, learned years ago "how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out".

In themselves, his remarks were not outrageous â€" they're the sort of things people say when an inconvenient text message or email turns up. But this time, McChrystal miscalculated. Soldiers who do that get hit.

The reporter had been given extensive access to McChrystal's inner circle of loyal officers whose views of their political, military and diplomatic allies â€" foreign as well as in Kabul and Washington â€" are recorded in disastrously comic detail. Too many embedded reporters get suckered by access, he tells Jon Boone in today's Guardian.

Yet to judge from his own gleeful tone, Hastings seems over-impressed by the macho special forces culture (meeting a French minister is described as "fucking gay") he was observing up close and personal, as civilian reporters often do in the presence of bloodthirsty soldiers bursting with testosterone and self-confidence.

Our own General Mike Jackson has that effect on some people. You wouldn't want to bump into Jacko up a dark alley.

Hastings notes that, barely a year after taking over as the US/Nato commander in Kabul, McChrystal "has managed to piss off almost everybody with a stake in the conflict". Everybody except President Hamid Karzai, with whom he apparently had uniquely good relations.

Needless to say, McChrystal's "Team America" regards the US as having no allies in Afghanistan, a view Hastings endorses, which is also revealing in itself.

British squaddies dying out there in proportionately larger numbers than their cousins will take note, as they no doubt did when Britain's special envoy, ex-ambassador Sherard Cowper-Cowles, quit this week. Notoriously sceptical about Iraq, he was a negotiate not fight man in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani analyst Ahmed Rashid, the author of Taliban, which everyone rushed to buy after 9/11, is right to observe in the FT that disputes among Afghan leaders are matched by the lack of cohesion among the Nato allies, notably within the US camp.

Key players such as Richard Holbrooke, Karl Eikenberry, the general turned ambassador, and officials in Washington do not seem to speak much to each other. U.S. Dollars to buy a lot of corruption.

Surrounded by the conflicting advice, the president - who is anti-aliasing so long before covering McChrystal 's counter-insurgency (Coin) strategy and the troop surge - not imposed by itself. Defence commentator Robert Fox sets out the context and to comment Free .

All the same, Chris McGreal reported in the Guardian that Obama is still refusing either to drop his July 2011 timetable for a start to US troop withdrawal or its acceleration. The right wants a more open-ended commitment, while leftish Democrats want to pull out sooner. Obama faces what will be a tough re-election race in November 2012.

McChrystal is said to have voted for Obama, but did not hit it off with the president when they met â€" after Obama had sacked his Afghan commander, General David McKiernan.

He 's got a sophisticated Media Player so that we can assume that he knew that he was setting the tails in Washington, where he fought hard bureaucratic battle to get the strategy approved coins.

It 's one of several paradoxes in this yarn. McChrystal won and got what he wanted. But Hasn 't work, how the Taliban have not been bloodied in the negotiations, not to mention the surrender.

This latest row might be an attempt to duck the blame or blame spineless civilians for military failure. General David Petraeus, the military miracle maker, has been dispatched to the field again.

Before we leave McChrystal to whatever fate has in store for him, it's worth noting that his Coin strategy has proved unpopular with troops on the ground, even though they know he's a real soldier who pops up on patrol with them.

Why? Because he's stopped excessive use of air power which kills innocent Afghan civilians. Coin leads to more US deaths and, at a tense meeting, Hastings reports in his Rolling Stone piece, the grunts were not persuaded by their general.

Good for him, do I hear you say? Well, yes. In Vietnam, they used to call it "hearts and minds". But McChrystal is no softie. He was the Pentagon spokesman during the Iraq war, mixed up in George Bush's disastrous "mission accomplished" PR gaffe, and there was also prisoner abuse on his watch at Camp Nama, in Iraq.

But the Hastings detail that struck me as most bizarre was his reporting, in a very irony-free way, that when the general's wife turns up in Paris for a rare meeting to celebrate their wedding anniversary, he invites his soldiers along for the dinner too in the least French, most Irish bar they can find. They all get plastered.

It 's certainly enough to convince us that the talk about McChrystal to run for the White House is quite far from the truth. As for Petraeus, I 'D said cancer survivor who faints at a congressional hearing - as he did the other day - can not stomach or stamina for presidential politics either.

But you can never tell. When Lincoln sacked his useless and procrastinating (but popular) commander of the army of the Potomac,, Catastrophically wrong guy ran against him for president in 1864.

It was Lincoln's winning general, US Grant, who won the White House four years later and was as bad a president as he was a great general.

As for General MacArthur in 1951, people feared that it could work until the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings exposed his vanity and ignorance. It was Ike who took the White House from the Democrats in 1952.

It's the quiet ones, not the noisy show-offs, that you've got to watch.

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