All of Washington was atwitter yesterday over excerpts the New York Times and Washington Post published from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s forthcoming book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War. Significantly, President George W. Bush nominated Gates in 2006 and President Obama retained him until he retired in 2011, evidently, as a thoroughly dismayed and disillusioned career public servant.
The Times clearly intended mischief by publishing the most provocative excerpts under the tortured headline: “Bipartisan Critic Turns His Gaze Toward Obama – In His New Memoir, Robert M. Gates, the Former Defense Secretary, Offers a Critique of the President.”
Here’s what it reported as Gates’s fatal blow, referring to a White House meeting in March 2011 when Obama was expressing frustrations and doubts about his generals and purported Afghan partner, President Hamid Karzai:
‘As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,’ Mr. Gates writes. ‘For him, it’s all about getting out.’
But, truth be told, as political hits (or stabs in the back) go, this amounts to little more than a love tap. Not least because Obama did nothing to hide his frustrations and doubts as charged.
In fact, I was so aghast at him channeling Hamlet over whether to go all in or cut America’s losses and run that I presaged Gates’s hit in far more damning fashion in “Obama Escalates Afghan War: the “Die” Is Cast on His Presidency,” December 2, 2009: Here’s an extended excerpt that I hope you’ll find edifying and prescient in equal measure:
Obama’s now infamous dithering over this strategy clearly telegraphed his intent to find the most politically palatable way to give his generals the additional forces they requested. And there can be no denying that political concerns figured every bit as prominently in his deliberations as military ones…
I appreciate of course that Obama is merely fulfilling his campaign promise to fight and win this war. But the changed circumstances on the ground today (viz the political mess a venal, unstable, and untrustworthy Karzai created that would compromise even a flawless military strategy) makes his decision to follow through almost as foolhardy as Bush’s decision to follow through with his invasion of Iraq … even after it was clear that there were no WMDs there…
Never mind the folly of announcing that he’ll begin bringing troops home in 18 months and have them all out in seven years to make sure the Afghan government gets the message that he’s ‘not giving them a blank check.’ After all, this not only encourages the Taliban to simply lie in wait, it also defies the common sense of conveying this message privately.
Meanwhile, I do not see how Obama can possibly justify the loss of life and waste of money that will occur over this period just for him to end up doing in seven years what President Nixon did way too belatedly in Vietnam; that is, declaring victory and going home….
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Still, I believe two other, shorter excepts are worth sharing to put Obama’s fatally flawed Afghan strategy into proper context:
- From “Without (or even with) More Forces, Failure in Afghanistan Is Likely,” September 23, 2009:
Obama would be well-advised to cut America’s losses and run ASAP; to let the Afghans govern themselves however they like; and to rely on Special Forces and aerial drones to ‘disrupt and dismantle’ Taliban and al-Qaeda operations there.
- From “Obama’s Withdrawal Plan … a Tragic Joke,” June 22, 2011:
Just as it was in Vietnam, the presence of U.S. troops is only delaying the day of reckoning when local factions will fight it out among themselves for control of their own country. So the sooner the U.S. gets out of the way the better. Not to mention the lives and money an immediate withdrawal would save.
In any case, the war in Afghanistan today is more about Obama’s Faustian ambition (he doesn’t want to be the president who loses this unwinnable war) than about U.S. national security…
[But] the blood of every troop who has died (and will die) because he decided to escalate this war instead of ending it in 2009 is on his hands. No doubt this explains the lines now creasing his face and grey hairs now sprouting up all over his head.
I trust these excerpts show why I find nothing sensational or even newsworthy about Gates’s take. I must say, though, that he did little to inspire confidence by relying on a condescending trope Christian fundamentalists use to rationalize their homophobia, namely, hate the sin, not the sinner. For in trying to rationalize his antic critique, Gates took pains to say that Obama had doubts about the mission, not about the troops.
All the same, I’m sure many will be interested in how Gates settles the score with other members of Obama’s “team of rivals;” most notably saying that VP Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of nearly every foreign policy and national security issue over the past 40 years, and that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was unabashed in admitting that her positions, even on issues as grave as war and peace, were always calibrated to further her political ambitions.
But these hits are of no consequence today, and I doubt anybody will even remember them when Biden and Hillary begin contesting in earnest next year for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. For the record, though, Gates should concede that Biden was right on two of the most important foreign policy challenges of the past 40 years:
- Given the sectarian mess Iraq has become, Biden was clearly right to call (from the floor of the Senate on April 24, 2007) for a federalized country with a viable central government and three semi-autonomous Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni provinces – each responsible for its own domestic laws, administration, and internal security. In this he echoed the call I made in “At Last, Rumsfeld Becomes a Casualty of Iraq War,” November 9, 2006:
Now I fear the only hope is to partition the country into Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni zones and leave them to defend their own boarders and barter (or fight) for a share Iraq’s oil wealth.
- Given the ungovernable mess Afghanistan always was, Biden was clearly right to call (as the Huffington Post chronicled in an October 14, 2009 report) for Obama to limit U.S. involvement:
… only [to] what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units.
In this he echoed the call I made in “Without (or even with) More Forces, Failure in Afghanistan Is Likely,” September 23, 2009 (excerpted above) for Obama to withdraw all troops and rely on drones and Special Forces.
Interestingly enough, while the media are making far too much ado about Gates’s love tap on Obama, they are giving short shrift to the nuclear salvo he landed on members of Congress:
Much of my frustration came from the exceptional offense I took at the consistently adversarial, even inquisition-like treatment of executive-branch officials by too many members of Congress across the political spectrum — creating a kangaroo-court environment in hearings, especially when television cameras were present…
When they went into an open hearing, and the little red light went on atop a television camera, it had the effect of a full moon on a werewolf…
I also bristled at what’s become of congressional hearings, where rude, insulting, belittling, bullying and all too often highly personal attacks on witnesses by members of Congress violated nearly every norm of civil behavior.
(Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2014)
To this every sensible American would surely say, Amen.
Unfortunately, excerpts show Gates holding so many incomprehensible and inconsistent views that one gets the impression his book is more personal rant than political memoirs.
This might explain his irrational praise for Bush’s cocksure decision-making style, which led to the plainly ill-advised invasion of Iraq. It might explain his irrational rebuke of Obama for daring to put the Pentagon’s armchair generals through their paces to explain exactly how their repeated requests for more troops and armaments would help the United States complete its mission of building an Afghanistan that could govern and defend itself. (American history is replete with wars that became quagmires because presidents allowed generals to determine policy as well as execute strategy. Yet Gates, like far too many Republicans who resent civilian control of the military, seems to think that Obama should have repeated this mistake with respect to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) But, schizophrenically enough, it might also explain his serene praise for Obama’s decision to order Special Forces into Pakistan to get bin Laden. Gates hails this as “one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House,” which is saying a lot coming from a man who served eight presidents
Yet nothing gives the impression that his book is more personal rant than political memoirs quite like Gates slamming members of Congress for uncivil behavior. Because there’s nothing civil about leaving the White House and running straight into a publishing house to write a tell-all memoirs. Especially given that it includes information about the president’s distrust of Karzai that could compromise the ongoing war effort Gates professed to be so dedicated to.
I mean, if the defense secretary has no scruples about betraying what the president says in private about foreign leaders, is it any wonder that a lowly government contractor has none about betraying how the NSA spies on them? And, apropos of inconsistent (if not hypocritical) views, I’d bet my life savings that Gates views Edward Snowden as a traitor.
Ultimately, it’s one thing for White House staffers to write books to settle scores and make a quick buck – as Bush’s former Press Secretary Scott McClellan did with his truly damning What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. But it sets a new precedent for betrayal in this respect for a former cabinet secretary to do so. Especially given not just that Obama is still in office, but that this self-described “secretary of war” knows full well that he’s still commanding American troops in the killing fields of Afghanistan.
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* I’m still under the weather but my nurse thought it would be therapeutic for me to write this instead of hurling expletives at reporters and pundits on TV parroting the same talking points on this story.