I’ve taken out some, though only some, of my many frustrations over our bloody and pointless war in Afghanistan by frequently ridiculing the columns of Fred Kaplan on the war. Writing for Slate, Kaplan, who has a lot of experience with foreign affairs, slowly metamorphosed from Afghan cheer leader to cautious skeptic to outright disbeliever over the years without ever confessing his sins.
Well, God’s for confessing, right? The rest of us don’t have the right to demand contrition. But Fred does a good job making up for his sins by giving us the best read on Robert Gates’ new memoir Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War. Fred notes that Gates himself never really confesses his sins on Afghanistan—that is, Gates criticizes Obama for doubting the U.S. “mission” in Afghanistan without admitting that he (Gates) actually agreed with Obama. We had bit off more than we could chew in Afghanistan, and preferred to gag on the chaw—at a cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars—rather than admit our error!
At the time Gates took over the job of Secretary of Defense in 2006 to clean up Donnie Rumfeld’s disastrous reign, he published a book, titled rather too floridly From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. We shouldn’t blame Gates for the title, and from what I’ve read online it’s definitely a book I’d like to read.
As Kaplan points out, in his new book, Gates faults the Bush administration on substance and the Obama boys on style, though he doesn’t make it that crisp. Gates is quite aware of the generation gap. The young whippersnappers in the White House he complains about are two generations removed from his era. More than that, as post Cold War Democrats, they simply had no idea of where Gates was coming from. For all they knew, he might as well as having been speaking Latin. It’s not surprising that he bonded with fellow geezer Hillary Clinton. He seems to have hated super-geezer Joe Biden. It couldn’t have been because Uncle Joe was right on Afghanistan from the get-go, could it?
Gates naturally sees himself as the nonpartisan, follow-the-facts bureaucrat/patriot, which he very largely was. But, I’m sorry, Bob, we all have a touch of the Old Scratch. It was you who insisted in 2011 that by 2016 North Korea would have an ICBM that would allow them to menace the U.S. with nuclear annihilation—they would be a “direct threat”. That was nonsense and you knew it. You fought mightily against the “spend for the sake of spending” bureaucrats at the Pentagon, and here you were doing their dirty work for them.
