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09.25 State Elections Boards Seeks Volunteers to Help Process Unprecedented Number of Voter Applications
09.18 Reviewing Danny Schechter's "Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal"
Ref. : Letters to the editor
09.30 To Joe Biden: Time for Confession
09.28 Open Letter to Senator Barack Obama
09.26 Bailout Package Must be Transparent to the American People
09.18 Possible $2 Million Donation to Support Md. Slots Sends Wrong Message
10.02 Project Censored's Media Democracy Advocacy
09.23 Satire: Louella Reads the Baltimore Sun
09.22 CBS Cheats on Tax Coverage
09.10 Post's Post-Convention 'Balancing' Act
09.10 McCain/Palin Campaign Relies on Lazy Thinking and Prejudice to Win
09.10 The Rising Cost of the Iraq 'Surge'
10.07 Voting the Fate of the Nation
10.07 Alaska GOP's Last-Ditch Palin Defense
10.07 Election '08: Here Comes the Sludge
10.02 John McCain v. The Truth
10.02 Drinking at the Public Fountain
10.01 Who won the Mississippi debate? Obama—but for different reasons than you think
09.30 The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic Attack as Bailout Goes Bust
09.29 The Resurrectionists: Beltway's Big Money Cultists Bail Out the Dead
09.29 We Have the Money
09.27 Debate Evades Dark Realities
09.26 Alaskan Officials Allege Palin Cover-up
09.24 Don’t Worry, Be Happy
09.24 Text of Draft Proposal for Bailout Plan
09.24 Hey, Government! How About Calling on Us?
09.23 Coming Attractions: War Without End, Amen
09.22 The Evolution of John McCain
09.21 Palin's 'Troopergate' Battle Rages
09.19 Burning the First Amendment
09.15 Subverting Democracy Through Electoral Fraud
09.15 Military Industrial Complex 2.0
09.13 Acceptable Sacrifice: For the Right to Endorse
09.13 Why More Soldiers from Alaska?
09.12 Experience is Over-Rated
09.10 Obama Must Call for Palin's Removal from the Ticket
09.10 9/11 Plus Seven
09.10 Palin's Strange Probe of a Trooper
09.10 Dear Democrats: Integrity Won’t Win this Election
10.06 The Wounded Shark: 'Good War' Lost, But the Imperial Project Goes On
10.02 U.S. Army Troops To Serve As U.S. Policemen?
09.25 Life on the Ledge
09.16 "Awakening" Into Nightmare: Seeding More Sectarian War in Iraq
10.06 Thinking About Treason
10.06 The Fleecing of America
10.03 Can a bailout succeed?
10.02 Empire of Greed
10.02 No Surprise in the Senate Bailout Vote
10.02 How Wall Street Can Bail Itself Out Without Destroying The Dollar
10.02 The Specter of Wall Street
10.01 We Need to Demand Hearings!
09.30 Surprise! Congress Listened to the Voting Public!
09.29 Thinking About Gyrations
09.29 Grand Theft America
09.26 Seizing America by Withholding the Mother’s Milk of Politics
09.26 Framing the $700 Billion Question
09.26 Bail Out NO, Buy Out YES
09.26 Just Say "No" to Any Immediate Bailout
09.26 Has Deregulation Sired Fascism?
09.25 Don't Fuel the Fire: Fire the Arsonists
09.25 America Pays the Piper, Big Time
09.24 Just Thinking Aloud Here
09.23 What Nobody's Saying: The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar
09.22 Thinking About Escalations
09.18 US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling From Direct Hits
09.18 US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling From Direct Hits
09.17 Creative Destruction: The Solid Core Behind the Financial Crisis
09.16 You Can't Feel Blue About the Economy If You Want To. There Are No Blue Chips Anymore
09.15 Thinking About Spotlights
09.15 U.S. Economy—Temporary Respite, Permanent Decline
09.26 Annals of Liberation: Sex is Death in a Darkened Land
09.25 New Coup D'Etat Rumblings in Venezuela
09.22 Remembering Edward Said Five Years On
09.20 Filter Tips: Distortion and Demonization on the Iran Beat
09.11 Wall Street and Washington
COMMENTARY:
Bob Gates on the Iraq War Hot Seat
Defense Secretary Robert Gates may be confronting the career decision of a lifetime: Should the former CIA director lash himself to the mast with George W. Bush and risk going down with the foundering Iraq War ship or should he look to a post-Bush period and position himself as a Washington wise man?Like Gates, Clifford replaced a Defense Secretary (Robert McNamara) who was tied to an increasingly unpopular war. McNamara was considered as much an architect of the Vietnam War as Gates’s predecessor (Donald Rumsfeld) was of the Iraq War.
In another parallel, it was learned later that McNamara harbored grave doubts about the prospects for victory in Vietnam and that Rumsfeld privately urged Bush to consider a de-escalation in Iraq before stepping down last November.
But a key difference in the cases of Clifford and Gates is that Clifford initiated the excruciating process of withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, while Gates so far has simply overseen an escalation of U.S. troops into Iraq, the “surge.” Instead of convincing Bush to look for a route out of Iraq, Gates helped send more troops in.
The question now confronting Gates is whether he will continue to be Bush’s loyal front man on the war or chart a course closer to the views of the Pentagon’s top brass who favor a sharp reduction in U.S. troop levels in Iraq next year.
On Aug. 24, the Los Angeles Times reported that Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was expected to advise Bush to cut U.S. forces in Iraq by almost half in 2008, reflecting concerns that continued high troop levels in Iraq would damage American readiness elsewhere.
The Times wrote that the Joint Chiefs favored reducing U.S. force levels in Iraq to below 100,000 soldiers, down from the current 162,000. White House officials and Bush’s hand-picked commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, favor maintaining higher numbers, about 134,000 troops through 2008.
Pace’s position – favoring nearly halving the Iraq troop levels – is privately shared by Gates, the Times reported.
“According to administration and military officials, the Joint Chiefs believe it is of crucial strategic importance to reduce the size of the U.S. force in Iraq in order to bolster the military's ability to respond to other threats, a view that is shared by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates,” the Times wrote.
The case for an Iraq War drawdown also got a boost on Aug. 23 when Sen. John Warner of Virginia, ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, urged Bush to start bringing at least some U.S. troops – possibly 5,000 – home by Christmas.
“We simply cannot as a nation stand and continue to put our troops at continuous risk of loss of life and limb without beginning to take some decisive action,'' Warner said after returning from an inspection tour of Iraq.
But one of Bush’s new Iraq field commander, Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, promptly slapped down Warner’s idea. In a video news conference on Aug. 24, Lynch vowed to keep U.S. troops at high levels until the Iraqi army is ready to do the job.
“Only when the Iraqi security forces come forward and say ‘OK, here I am, I’m trained and equipped, I’m ready, I’m the Iraqi Army or I’m the Iraqi police,’ can I turn those sanctuaries over, and that’s not going to happen between now and Christmas,” said Lynch, who oversees areas south and east of Baghdad.
The looming confrontation between the Joint Chiefs and congressional war critics on one side and the White House and Bush’s new field generals on the other could test Gates’s famed skills for political maneuvering.
In his meteoric rise at the CIA in the early 1980s, Gates tied his fortunes to the star of Ronald Reagan’s hard-line CIA Director William Casey. That worked well for Gates who was named chief of the CIA’s analytical division and then CIA deputy director.
However, Gates’s career path took a detour when the Iran-Contra scandal broke and congressional Democrats suspected that Gates had misled them. Those doubts wrecked Gates’s plan to succeed Casey, who died in May 1987.
Gates’s career was salvaged by George H.W. Bush when he became President in 1989 and named Gates to be a deputy national security adviser. When the Iran-Contra scandal quieted down in 1991, Bush elevated Gates to CIA director.
After Bush’s 1992 defeat, Gates was forced out of government and ended up as president of Texas A&M. He was lured back to the power circles of Washington when President George W. Bush named him to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group in 2006 and then sought him out to replace Rumsfeld.
In a secret memo sent to Bush on Nov. 6, Rumsfeld called for a “major adjustment” in Iraq War policy. “Clearly what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough,” Rumsfeld wrote, seeking consideration of “an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases” from 55 to 10 to 15 by April 2007 and to five by July 2007.
Rumsfeld also suggested that U.S. generals “withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions – cities, patrolling, etc. – and move U.S. forces to a Quick Reaction Force status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance.”
And in an implicit criticism of Bush’s lofty rhetoric about transforming Iraq and the Middle East, Rumsfeld said the administration should “recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) – go minimalist.” [NYT, Dec. 3, 2006]
Rumsfeld submitted his resignation letter the same day as his memo, though both documents were kept hidden until later leaked to the news media. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Rumsfeld’s Mysterious Resignation.”]
When Rumsfeld’s departure and Gates’s appointment were announced on Nov. 8 – the day after the Democratic congressional election victory – the moves were interpretted as a signal that Bush was ready to start compromising with the new Democratic majority and winding down the Iraq War.
That conventional wisdom turned out to be dead wrong. In reality, the abrasive Rumsfeld had embraced a troop reduction and the mild-mannered Gates had stepped in as the pleasant front man for Bush’s escalation in defiance of the Democrats, the Pentagon brass and Iraq's field commanders, Generals John Abizaid and George Casey.
Bush soon replaced Abizaid and Casey with Petraeus and other field generals who were on board for the surge; the Joint Chiefs grudgingly fell into line; and Gates offered a less-confrontational style in selling Bush’s new strategy.
As the months wore on, Gates continued to draw favorable reactions from both the Democrats and the Washington press corps. He was portrayed as a sensitive man who was troubled by the burdens of war and who choked up when talking about dead soldiers.
But now Gates finds himself on the hot seat. He must decide whether he will stay with President Bush, Gen. Petraeus and other “continue-the-surge” advocates – or side with the Joint Chiefs, congressional war critics and the broader American public in demanding that the troops start to come home.
The Defense Secretary’s decision could have a major impact on the course of the war and go a long way to determining how history will judge Robert Gates. [For more on Gates’s record, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Why Trust Robert Gates on Iraq?”]
This article is republished in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.
This story was published on August 25, 2007.
