OUR VIEW: Soldiers, do not badmouth Obama (vote in poll)

If you work for the military, do not badmouth President Barack Obama. If you dislike him, suck it up and act like a professional. Speak of the commander in chief with respect or don’t speak of him at all. Learn from Gen. Stanley McChrystal how not to behave.

It’s hard to imagine a worse example of high-level military insubordination than the stunt McChrystal pulled, giving scathing remarks about Obama to a Rolling Stone magazine writer for a tawdry article that’s littered with F-bombs. It’s also hard to think of an easier presidential decision than the one Obama made Wednesday, when he accepted McChrystal’s resignation as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. In the United States, we are free to express almost anything we want to about the president of the United States. Like any president, Obama has vociferous detractors on the right, the left and all points in between. One cannot serve as president without becoming a target of criticism and cynicism. Even history’s most popular presidents had no shortage of loud detractors during their lives and long after their deaths.

Detractors often have legitimate gripes, and others just need to vent. In the age of the Internet and phone-in talk radio, they are able to mass communicate their complaints more than ever before. The noise can make political condescension almost irresistible to armchair executives and policy wonks and in some ways it’s healthy. Americans should always question authority.

Obama inherited two interventionist wars from another progressive advocate of big government, former President George W. Bush. Neither quagmire has improved much under Obama’s leadership, though we have a commitment from him to back out of Iraq. The American public, and the military, are getting frustrated. It’s possible McChrystal’s Afghanistan concerns have merit, despite the embarrassing and unprofessional manner he chose for airing them.

Obama inherited a country in economic peril, largely because of interventionist wars. By some measures, he has made economic problems worse by borrowing and spending even more than big-spender Bush.

So criticize Obama all you want, while hoping he can make our country better. Conflict-oriented discourse, protected by the First Amendment, is a major element of the checks and balances that keep political leaders serving rather than ruling.

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But McChrystal didn’t speak as a civilian with First Amendment rights to criticize the commander in chief. He is not talk radio host. He spoke as an employee of Obama’s. Any success we may have in Afghanistan, where few have succeeded in war and many have perished, will involve a military with impeccable integrity — a military in which orders come from the top and ripple in orderly fashion through the ranks. If Obama’s war-leadership is weak, it’s weakened more by insubordination.

Military personnel are free to indulge radical disagreement with Obama, but they must do so privately. Like it or not, Obama is their boss, and they owe him professional respect.

— Wayne Laugesen , editorial page editor, for the editorial board. Friend him on Facebook