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In his first months at the Pentagon, Gates certainly didn't seem like a hesitant skeptic about the war policies. He played a key role in helping President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney escalate the war in Iraq and thus make their escape into the sunset without having lost a war on their watch.
That was 90 percent of what the celebrated "surge" of troops into Iraq was about, staving off an obvious defeat, even if it cost the lives of an additional 1,000 or so U.S. soldiers and many more Iraqis. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Afghan Lessons from the Iraq War."]
Then, after he was kept on by Obama, Gates supported a similar "surge" in Afghanistan, pushing for a 40,000-troop increase in late 2009. Obama groused that Gates and the generals wouldn't provide a meaningful set of alternative options to the escalation, but Obama finally relented and sent 30,000 more troops.
So, it would seem an odd swing for Gates to suggest now that psychiatric care is in order for anyone loony enough to commit U.S. ground forces to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, that was pretty much what Gates had done.
What's Behind the Change?
I'll acknowledge that Gates may have come to his new-found skepticism about these ground wars honestly, sincerely distraught by the continued loss of life as the bloody conflicts grind on with no real end in sight.
Yet, I would venture to suggest that -- more likely -- the timing of Gates's conversion can be pinned on two other factors, a typically windsock reaction to recent polling on Afghanistan and an attempt to burnish his future wise-man reputation:
--U.S. public opinion has swung dramatically against the war in Afghanistan, with some polls showing that as many as 86 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Republicans want a speedier U.S. pullout from the war.
--Gates has announced he will retire in the coming months. By abandoning his post on the bridge of the sinking pro-war ship now, Gates will let the next secretary of defense take the blame when the U.S. does not "prevail" in Afghanistan. Gates can point to his echoing of MacArthur's warning.
I base this assessment, in part, on having observed Gates very closely in the early 1970s when I headed the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch at CIA and had supervisory responsibilities for Gates.
Within months of his arrival as a new analyst, his overweening careerist ambitions became all too obvious to his analyst colleagues as well as to me, and became a disruptive influence on the whole branch.
I felt it necessary to record this on his first Efficiency Report and to counsel him about his behavior. However, he didn't change. He only became more proficient at climbing the career ladder and stepping over anyone who got in his way.
Gates made his first big jump early in the Reagan administration under CIA Director William Casey, a Cold War hardliner who disapproved of the careful, objective work on the Soviet Union done by experienced analysts of Soviet Communism.
Casey found Gates to be more pliable, willing to cook up the analytical results that Casey and the White House wanted.
The cooking was consequential, too. It facilitated not only illegal capers like the Iran-Contra Affair but also budget-breaking military spending against an exaggerated Soviet threat that, in reality, had long since passed its peak.
Talk to anyone who was there at the time (except the sycophants Gates co-opted) and they will explain that Gates's meteoric career had mostly to do with his uncanny ability to see a Russian under every rock turned over by Casey.
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