Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, former Secretary of State Robert Gates’ memoirs of his years as SecDef, have been excerpted and/or discussed by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. If you follow this sort of thing, you know that Bob loved Hillary, definitely a feather in her cap, hated the Obama White House staff, loathed Congress, and thought Joe Biden always got it wrong. But here’s something Bob said in the Journal that hasn’t been talked about much.
Today, too many ideologues call for U.S. force as the first option rather than a last resort. On the left, we hear about the “responsibility to protect” civilians to justify military intervention in Libya, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere. On the right, the failure to strike Syria or Iran is deemed an abdication of U.S. leadership. And so the rest of the world sees the U.S. as a militaristic country quick to launch planes, cruise missiles and drones deep into sovereign countries or ungoverned spaces. There are limits to what even the strongest and greatest nation on Earth can do—and not every outrage, act of aggression, oppression or crisis should elicit a U.S. military response.
When he gets down to specifics, Gates is not entirely noble. According to the Post, “he writes that he does not know what he would have recommended if he had been asked his opinion on Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq,” a statement that enables him to avoid saying whether he thought the invasion had proved successful, though his quoted words certainly imply that he feels it was not. In fact, the “case” for invading Iraq was entirely fraudulent. Iraq had no involvement in the 9/11 attacks and its “weapons of mass destruction,” which in fact it did not have, were no threat to the U.S. or Israel—Saddam only used them against other Muslims, with U.S. acquiescence and even assistance (against Iran). The whole purpose of the invasion was to insert an American army in the Middle East and build a military presence there that would give both military and political dominance over more than 100 million entirely unwilling Muslims. If Bob can’t bring himself to say that that was an atrocious idea, he has no business unloading on poor old Joe Biden, whose advice about not getting deep in Afghanistan looked awfully good to me at the time and looks even better now.
Update
At the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner notes that Bob Woodward is a big fat liar. Well, not in so many words, but Isaac does point out how Bob “Big Fat Liar” Woodward, in his synopsis of Gates’ memoir, makes Gates say things he didn’t say. Woodward, wrapping Gates’ words in a cocoon of hyperbole, has this to say:
Well, except for the “more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat” part, Woodward is mostly accurate. Woodward’s piece is headlined “Robert Gates, former defense secretary, offers harsh critique of Obama’s leadership in ‘Duty’,” which doesn’t quite comport with another statement from Gates’ book grudgingly quoted by Woodward: ““I believe Obama was right in each of these decisions [on Afghanistan].”
Andrew Sullivan does a nice job of collecting comments around the web that catch Gates’ own evasions and inconsistencies. The Post’s Greg Jaffe, whose discussion of Gates’ memoir is far superior to Woodward’s, puts it this way:
He recounts his thoughts during a tense 2011 meeting with Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, in the White House Situation Room: “As I sat there I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
The critique will infuriate the parents and spouses of troops who were killed trying to execute Obama’s Afghan war strategy. But Gates doesn’t prove his damning accusation and can be maddeningly self-contradictory in his criticism of Obama. He describes the president’s decision to send 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan as courageous and politically unpopular. “Obama overruled the policy and domestic political concerns of his vice president and virtually all the senior White House staff,” Gates writes. Why would the president pursue a politically unpopular strategy that he believed would fail? Gates never attempts to explain the contradiction.
Sullivan shares my own opinion that Obama realized early on that Afghanistan was a loser, but decided, in extreme cold blood, that he dare not act on that understanding, for fear of infuriating the military-politico complex. Sullivan rightly blames Gates for faulting Obama for realizing that a disastrous policy was in fact disastrous. In fact, Gates even praises George W. Bush for never having second thoughts about his decision to invade Iraq, which strikes me as the epitome of folly. You’re never wrong unless you admit you’re wrong!
My very strong impression is that Gates feels guilty about having sent thousands of young men to kill and be killed in Afghanistan, to die in a war that was both unwinnable and irrelevant to the security of the United States of America. And while he weeps for the thousands of American dead, he sheds not a tear for the tens of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi dead, who died, apparently, so that important men like himself would not have to admit that they didn’t know what they were doing.
I will also link to a column I wrote on Jan. 11, 2011 castigating Gates for saying that, according to the New York Times, “North Korea was within five years of being able to target the continental United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile.” If by “targeting” Gates meant “finding the U.S. on a map,” well, he was probably right. But if not, he was simply engaging in mindless war-mongering, and I suspect it was the latter.
Virtually all the comments on Gates’ book paint him as a good and wise man. I’m less impressed.
