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With Robert Gates in charge, there will be no change in policy. Perhaps we'll see a change in how it is executed, moving it to more secret deals and skull duggery.This background info on Gates is from the AP wire story (11-8-06):
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/rumsfeld_resigns
"Gates took over the CIA as acting director in 1987, when William Casey was terminally ill with cancer. Questions were raised about Gates' knowledge of the
Iran-Contra affair, and he withdrew from consideration to take over the CIA permanently. Yet he stayed on as deputy director.
Then-National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who has been a critic of the younger Bush's policies, asked Gates to be his deputy in 1989 during the administration of Bush's father. The elder President Bush, a former CIA director himself, asked Gates to run the CIA two years later.
Gates won confirmation, but only after hearings in which he was accused by CIA officials of manipulating intelligence as a senior analyst in the 1980s.
Melvin Goodman, a former CIA division chief for Soviet affairs, testified that Gates politicized the intelligence on Iran, Nicaragua,
Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. "Gates' role in this activity was to corrupt the process and the ethics of intelligence on all of these issues," Goodman testified.
The Bush administration's use of intelligence on Iraq has been a central theme of criticism from Democrats who say the White House stretched faulty intelligence from U.S. spy agencies to justify invading Iraq in 2003."
Given this appointment, how do the Democrats and Progressives position their opposition to the Repugs and not get hit with labels of partisanship and 'lefty liberals'? Rumsfeld's replacement offers the first test. How the new Congress responds to his appointment may tell us what's to come.
