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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 1/22/14

Bob Gates's Mean, Misguided Memoir

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There is meanness in the gratuitous criticism of Vice President Biden, who voted against Gates's confirmation as CIA director in 1991 and who told President Obama that he was getting the "bum's rush from the military" on its push for the "surge" in Afghanistan. Gates labeled Biden "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."

In fact, Gates and Biden were together on many issues, including U.S. policy in the wake of the Arab Spring and the Osama bin Laden raid (which both initially opposed). Gates even concludes his memoir with the view that "on issue after issue " the president, the vice president " and I were usually on the same page." As is often the case with Gates, it is not easy to distinguish which version of his contradictory statements he actually believes.

More significantly, it is Gates who has been wrong about so many intelligence and policy issues, including all of the central policy and intelligence issues of the 1980s dealing with Soviet-American relations and Mikhail Gorbachev. Even worse, and the reason he was so strongly criticized in 1991 was that Gates used intimidation to make sure that the CIA was wrong as well.

Finally, there is irony in the fact that Gates' greatest achievement as Secretary of Defense was arguably his role in advancing the mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle -- but that it was none other than Sen. Joe Biden who introduced the successful amendment to provide additional funding for the MRAP more than a month before Gates's decision.

If the MRAP was his greatest success, then Gates's greatest failure as Secretary of Defense was not mitigating the dangerous suspicion between the Obama White House and the Pentagon. Time and again, the Pentagon's senior leaders, particularly Admiral Mike Mullen and Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, made public comments or leaked controversial statements that were designed to force greater military deployments to Afghanistan, when it was clear that the President was wisely looking for a way out. Gates's unwillingness to accept that policy toward Afghanistan had changed in the White House led him to lead his own campaign to "win" a war that simply isn't winnable.

As a result of his frustration over Afghan decision-making, Gates makes the ugly assertion that President Obama does not have his heart in the Afghan War, which can only have a devastating impact on the troops to whom Gates has dedicated his book. Similarly, his charge that the President "can't stand" Afghan President Hamid Karzai adds one more irritant to the conclusion of a status-of-forces agreement with Kabul.

Gates's defiance of the President included dragging his heels on ending the cynical policy of "don't ask, don't tell," and allowing senior general officers to campaign publicly for a significant expansion of U.S. forces in Afghanistan long before any decision was actually made. In instructing one of his senior generals to tell a senior member of the National Security Council staff to "go to hell," Gates was demeaning the Obama White House.

There is no more important task in political governance than making sure that civilian control of the military is not compromised and the military remains subordinate to political authority. Unfortunately, President Obama initially demonstrated too much deference to the military, even retaining the Bush administration's Secretary of Defense as his own, and appointing too many general officers to key civilian positions such as national security adviser and intelligence tsar.

Gates's memoir is a slap in the face of President Obama as commander in chief. It also reflects a notable ignorance of the dangerous imbalance in civilian-military influence that is more threatening to the interests of the United States over the long-term than developments in a strategic backwater like Afghanistan.

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Melvin A. Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. He is a professor of international security studies and chairman of the international relations (more...)
 

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