General Stanley McChrystal was summoned to the White House for a dramatic meeting Wednesday to explain himself, as Obama said the four-star officer showed "poor judgment," leaving open the possibility he would fire the commander.

In Rolling Stone magazine's profile entitled "The Runaway General," McChrystal aides mock Vice President Joe Biden, call the president's national security adviser "a clown," and say the general was "disappointed" by his first meeting with Obama.

McChrystal himself is quoted deriding the US special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, and saying he felt "betrayed" by the ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who had raised pointed objections to his war strategy.

Obama said Tuesday he wanted to first talk with his top commander in Afghanistan before making any decision on his fate, but US media reported that even before McChrystal arrived he had offered his resignation.

The stakes were high for Obama as he faced two unattractive options, firing McChrystal and possibly derailing the war effort, or tolerating the episode and risk appearing weak.

The scathing article brought to the surface lingering tensions between military leaders and the White House, just as the US deploys 30,000 more troops to the bloody war now in its ninth year.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama was "angry" when he read the article, and refused to rule out the commander-in-chief would fire McChrystal.

"General McChrystal has fought bravely on behalf of this country for a long time. Nobody could or should take that away from him, and nobody will," Gibbs said.

"But there has clearly been an enormous mistake in judgment to which he's going to have to answer to."

After issuing a groveling apology, McChrystal flew from Kabul to attend in person Wednesday's monthly war briefing -- normally a video-conference that he hooks up to from his Kabul headquarters.

"I have recalled General McChrystal to Washington to discuss this in person," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a terse statement.

"I believe that General McChrystal made a significant mistake and exercised poor judgment in this case."

McChrystal issued a statement late Monday apologizing for his remarks and one of his media officers, Duncan Boothby, a civilian, has already resigned, but the fallout is unlikely to stop there.

The general already received a dressing down from Obama last year over his remarks at a London conference in which he appeared to reject Biden's argument in favor of fewer troops in Afghanistan.

In one passage in the interview that caused dismay at the White House and the Pentagon, an unnamed McChrystal adviser says the general came away unimpressed after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office a year ago.

"It was a 10-minute photo op," the general's adviser says. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was... he didn't seem very engaged."

As McChrystal's future hung in the balance, speculation mounted about who might succeed the commander, with General James Mattis -- a Marine known as an expert on counter-insurgency warfare -- topping the list of possible candidates.

Lawmakers in Congress condemned the general's remarks as troubling, but most of Obama's fellow Democrats stopped short of calling for McChrystal's removal.

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, said the article points to personality differences and "do not reflect differences in policy on prosecuting the war."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai endorsed the embattled commander and voiced hope the general would not be sacked, while NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen also backed McChrystal.

earlier related report
McChrystal aimed to send message to Obama: interviewer
Washington (AFP) June 22, 2010 - General Stanley McChrystal and his staff spoke on the record and wanted to send a message to US President Barack Obama conveying their "frustration" with the Afghan war policy, the Rolling Stone article's author said Tuesday.

Michael Hastings, the journalist who spent weeks with the blunt-talking commander of US forces in Afghanistan, also told ABC News it became clear during his time with McChrystal and his team that "there are serious skeptics (about the war) in the highest levels of his staff."

McChrystal has been summoned to the White House on Wednesday to explain the article in which he and senior aides criticized and mocked top officials, including commander-in-chief Obama.

"I think they were frustrated with how the policy was going, and I think there was an intent on their part to get a message out about that frustration," Hastings told ABC.

"The headline for me is, the war is out of Obama's control. Obama does not have control over the war in Afghanistan. He doesn't have control over the policy, and the policy has serious issues," Hastings said.

The article has ignited a firestorm in Washington, and questions swirled as to why McChrystal and aides would have been so blunt in their assessments.

The magazine's executive editor Eric Bates insisted that "everything we published was on the record."

"We got a lot of stuff off the record and didn't use it. We respected all of those boundaries," he told CNN.

"These weren't off-the-cuff remarks by his staff he didn't know about."

Bates said the stunning profile, entitled "The Runaway General," was helped by the fact that the author was stranded with McChrystal and his entourage when their flights were canceled due to ash from an Icelandic volcano in April.

"One of the reasons we got so much access was Michael Hastings was with the general and his staff in Paris, and they got stranded by the volcano in Iceland and couldn't fly to Berlin and had to take a bus.

"So our reporter was on the road with him for a number of days, went out drinking with them, saw them preparing for speeches, saw them going to meetings and then also went to Afghanistan."

"We were really behind the curtain and hearing how the general and his top staff talk among themselves amidst this war. They are a close knit group," Bates said. "They are in the war and this is how they talk behind the scenes when they are blowing off steam by themselves."

Hastings told NBC News that McChrystal and his aides were drinking "the whole way" on the bus trip to Berlin.

"They let loose," Hastings told the network. "I don't blame them; they have a hard job."

Hastings had familiarity with the top echelons of the US military from reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past three or four years.

On Tuesday, Hastings said McChrystal and his team were thoroughly aware that the reporter in their midst was using their quotes.

"There were no ground rules given to me. I had a tape recorder and notepad out the entire time," he told CNN by telephone from the Afghan city of Kandahar. "I think it was all very clear that it was on the record."

Hastings told ABC he attributed the shock statements to "a natural kind of recklessness that General McChrystal has, which has been with him through his entire career, as I understand it."

Bates said no one had asked them to pull the article, which he said was checked thoroughly by McChrystal's team, and he suggested its impact would be significant.

"These comments show a deep division, a war within the administration over the war itself and the strategy," he said.

"That war has been going on since the beginning over the troop escalation and continues very clearly between the military side and the diplomatic side, and it's very hard to see how we can win a war when we're divided ourselves."

Obama named McChrystal as commander in May 2009 to bring a fresh approach to the struggling Afghan campaign, but Hastings said the relationship "has been strained from the beginning."

"I think the frustration is that the president really believes in the mission in Afghanistan. That, I think, is at the root of the problem," he told NBC.

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