Seemingly with each passing day, General Stanley McChrystal grows in the esteem of President Obama's conservative foes. After having savaged General Eric Shinseki for his pre-Iraq war testimony that the occupation would require "several hundreds of thousands" of American troops, Republicans have seized on McChrystal's public demands for more forces in Afghanistan as their latest battering ram to bludgeon Obama on national security. And as it turns out, McChrystal's inadvertent leak earlier this month regarding a classified CIA analysis puts him in the same company as Republicans John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Pat Roberts and, of course, Dick Cheney.

McChrystal in his leaked report and unprecedented public speech in London has put tremendous pressure on President Obama to quadruple the Bush-era commitment to the Afghan conflict. General McChrystal didn't merely announce that short of deploying as many as 60,000 more troops, the U.S. effort in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure." He also set out to demolish straw man alternatives to his escalated counterinsurgency plan, including:

"A paper has been written that recommends that we use a plan called 'Chaosistan', and that we let Afghanistan become a Somalia-like haven of chaos that we simply manage from outside."

But as Newsweek reported, that "paper" to which General McChrystal casually referred is almost surely a classified CIA assessment:

Two U.S. intelligence officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive matter, say that the reference almost certainly comes from a recently published, and secret, CIA analysis titled "Chaosistan" (not "Chaostan"). Prepared by a "red team" of CIA analysts, the document, says one official, picks apart conventional analyses of the war and explains how forces inside Afghanistan--from hostile ethnic groups to intrusive neighbors to societal damage caused by past Taliban rule--work against the notions of a central Afghan government. The paper is not quite the policy proposal McChrystal implied it was, say the officials, since intelligence analysts don't generally recommend policy options.

Of course, the same Republican voices which lauded the leak of McChrystal's report and his UK grandstanding will doubtless remain silent now. Because while many in the GOP called for the prosecution of those behind the publication of the NSA domestic surveillance story, they themselves selectively leaked classified national security information for partisan political purposes.

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Retired Gen. Jack Keane told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that if he were Gen. Stanley McChrystal then he would resign if President Barack Obama doesn't fulfill the request for more troops.

Partial transcript:

KEANE: Well, I can't speak to what General McChrystal's reaction will be. I can say this, if you're a general on the ground and you believe that a recommendation you made is the winning recommendation in terms of strategy, that will accomplish the goals that you have been assigned, and then, you're told that you can't execute that and ask the troops to go out and do something else that you don't believe will accomplish those goals, that gets very difficult in terms of a morale dilemma -- asking your troops to do something that you believe will fail.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you resign?

KEANE: That would be up to him to face that. That's something personal for every general.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is that what you would do under those circumstances?

KEANE: Yes. The fact of the matter is, the president has a right to make decisions. One of the recommendations they get are from generals. That's the reality. The president also has a right to take information from other sources to inform those decisions.