Calling it the “right thing for our mission in Afghanistan,” Obama relieved Gen. Stanley McChrystal of his command after a 30-minute meeting at the White House and named Gen. David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, to replace him.

Gen. McChrystal had been summoned by Obama to explain remarks he and his aides made in a magazine article that disparaged the US president and other senior civilian leaders.

“The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general,” Obama said in the White House Rose Garden.

“It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system. And it erodes the trust that’s necessary for our team to work together to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan,” he said.

The sacking of Gen. McChrystal represents a rare dismissal of a wartime military commander by a civilian leader.

The general had given a long, close and after-hours access to a journalist from Rolling Stone and also apparently made no complaints when the magazine sent him a pre-publication copy. “McChrystal blew it. You don’t say those things in front of a reporter. And a good commander also doesn’t say those things in front of his subordinates,” a former Marine officer told Arab News.

Gen. McChrystal’s comments include saying he was reportedly “disappointed” at his “10-minute photo op” with President Barack Obama last year.

When preparing to answer a question about the vice president, he said that he found last fall “painful” because he was “trying to sell an unsellable position.”

He said he felt “betrayed” by US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry.

Gen. McChrystal accused him of “cover(ing) his flank for the history books” in criticizing Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Aides also called National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones a “clown…stuck in 1985,” and the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke a “wounded animal…hearing rumors he’s going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous.”

On Vice President Joe Biden, he commented: “Biden? Did you say ‘bite me’?”

The general immediately apologized for comments where his aides portrayed Obama as a disengaged dilettante and blasted his Afghanistan team as incompetent.

He also laughs about not wanting to open an e-mail from Holbrooke, and exhibits a reluctance to have a posh dinner in France. Gen. McChrystal’s comments have laid bare a nasty internal battle among members of Obama’s joint military-civilian Afghanistan team that is splintered by personality conflicts and divided over how to end the longest war in American history.

Military officials here told Arab News that Gen. McChrystal’s remarks were mostly ill-judged wisecracks. “Some aides need to wash their mouths out. That really is about it,” said one retired officer who preferred anonymity.

In Washington, reaction to the Rolling Stone story was immediate. Gen. McChrystal is said to have received unhappy phone calls from the White House, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and was summoned to DC to explain his comments in person to the president.

A McChrystal press aide has reportedly been fired over the incident, and Gen. McChrystal is understood to have tried calling nearly every figure mentioned in the article to apologize personally.

“Commanders who indulge in sloppy, tough guy, cowboy lingo — ‘smackdown, scumbags,’ etc. tend to run sloppy, tough guy, cowboy operations. Units, and especially staffs, tend to adopt the language and demeanor of their commander,” one Marine told Arab News.

“Afghanistan is a mess, and it’s getting worse. To make matters worse, the president’s been dealing with internal squabbling on this for some time,” said Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the Washington-based New America Foundation who has written extensively on Afghanistan.

“If there’s a bright side to all this, it’s that the president has an opportunity to reattach himself to a new policy, fire this guy and start with something new,” Clemons told reporters. “It’s a tremendous opportunity to reset. But he can’t do anything until he fires McChrystal.”

NATO will maintain its approach to Afghanistan after Gen. McChrystal’s sack, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. “While he will no longer be the commander, the approach he helped put in place is the right one,” Rasmussen said of Gen. McChrystal in a statement. “The strategy continues to have NATO’s support and our forces will continue to carry it out.”

— With input from agencies