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Robert Gates: As Bad As
Rumsfeld?
By Ray McGovern
“As Bad As Rumsfeld?”
The title jars, doesn’t it. The
more so, since Defense Secretary Robert Gates found his predecessor, Donald
Rumsfeld, such an easy act to follow. But
the jarring part reflects how malnourished most of us are on the thin gruel
served up by the Fawning Corporate Media
(FCM).
Over the past few months, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has
generated accolades from FCM pundits—like the Washington Post’s David Ignatius—that read like letters of
recommendation to graduate school. This
comes as no surprise to those of us familiar with Gates’ dexterity in
orchestrating his own advancement. What
DOES come as a surprise is the recurring rumor that President-elect Barack
Obama may decide to put new wine in old wineskins by letting Gates stay.
What can Barack Obama be thinking?
I suspect that those in Obama’s circle who are promoting
Gates may be the same advisers responsible for Obama’s most naïve comment of
the recent presidential campaign: that the “surge” of U.S. troops into Iraq in
2007-08 “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”
Succeeded? You
betcha—the surge was a great success in terms of the administration’s
overriding objective. The aim was to
stave off definitive defeat in Iraq until President George W. Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney could swagger from the West Wing into the western sunset
on Jan. 20, 2009. As author Steve Coll
has put it, “The decision [to surge] at a minimum guaranteed that his [Bush’s]
presidency would not end with a defeat in history’s eyes. By committing to the surge [the president]
was certain to at least achieve a stalemate.”
According to Bob Woodward, Bush told key Republicans in late
2005 that he would not withdraw from Iraq, “even if Laura and [first-dog]
Barney are the only ones supporting me.”
Later, Woodward made it clear that Bush was well aware in fall 2006 that
the U.S. was losing. Suddenly, with some
fancy footwork, it became Laura, Barney—and Robert Gates. And at the turn of 2006-07 the short-term fix
was in.
But Please, No More
Troops!
By the fall of 2006 it had become unavoidably clear that a
new course had to be chosen and implemented in Iraq, and virtually every sober
thinker seemed opposed to sending more troops.
The senior military, especially CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid and his
man on the ground, Gen. George Casey, emphasized that sending still more U.S.
troops to Iraq would simply reassure leading Iraqi politicians that they could
relax and continue to take forever to get their act together.
Here, for example, is Gen. Abizaid’s answer at the Senate
Armed Services Committee, Nov. 15, 2006 to Sen. John McCain, who had long been
pressing vigorously for sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq:
Senator McCain, I met with every divisional commander, General Casey,
the corps commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, in
your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now,
does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they
all said no. And the reason is because we want the Iraqis to do more. It is
easy for the Iraqis to rely upon to us do this work. I believe that more
American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more
responsibility for their own future.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad
sent a classified cable to Washington warning that “proposals to send more U.S.
forces to Iraq would not produce a long-term solution and would make our policy
less, not more, sustainable,” according to a New York Times retrospective on the surge by Michael R. Gordon
published on Aug. 31, 2008.
Khalilzad was
arguing, unsuccessfully, for authority to negotiate a political solution with
the Iraqis.
There was also the establishment-heavy Iraq Study Group, created by Congress and led by
Republican stalwart James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton. After months of policy review during
2006—with Gates as a member—it issued a final report on Dec. 6, 2006, which
began with the ominous sentence, “The situation in Iraq is grave and
deteriorating.” The report called for:
“A change in the primary mission
of US. Forces in Iraq that will enable the United States to begin to move its
combat forces out of Iraq responsibly…
By the first quarter of 2008…all combat brigades not necessary for force
protection could be out of Iraq.”
Robert Gates, who was CIA director under President George H.
W. Bush and then president of Texas A&M, had returned to the Washington
stage as a member of the Iraq Study
Group. While on the ISG, he evidenced no
disagreement with its emerging conclusions—at least not until Bush asked him in
early November if he might like to become secretary of defense.
Never one to let truth derail ambition, Gates suddenly saw
things quite differently. After Bush announced
his nomination on Nov. 8, Gates quit the ISG, but kept his counsel about its
already widely reported recommendations.
Gates to the Rescue
Gates would do what he needed to do to become defense
secretary. At his confirmation hearing
on Dec. 5, he obscured his opinions by telling the Senate Armed Services
Committee only that “all options are on the table in terms of Iraq.” Many Democrats, however, assumed that Gates
would help persuade Bush and Cheney to implement the ISG’s recommendation of a
troop drawdown.
With unanimous Democratic support and only two conservative
Republicans opposed, Gates was confirmed by the full Senate on Dec. 6, the same
day the ISG report was formally released.
Yet, the little-understood story behind Bush’s decision to
catapult Robert Gate into his Pentagon perch hinges on the astonishing fact
that Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, was pulling a Robert McNamara; that is, he
was going wobbly on a war based largely on his own hubris-laden, misguided
advice. As Robert Parry of
Consortiumnews.com has reported, in the fall of 2006 Rumsfeld was having a
reality attack. In Rumsfeldian parlance,
the man had come face to face with a “known known.”
On Nov. 6, 2006, a day before the midterm elections,
Rumsfeld sent a memo to the White House (see http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/world/middleeast/03mtext.html). In the memo Rumsfeld acknowledged, “Clearly,
what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast
enough.” The rest of his memo sounded
very much like the emerging troop-drawdown conclusions of the Iraq Study Group report.
The first 80 percent of Rumsfeld’s memo addressed
“Illustrative Options,” including his preferred—or “above the line”—options
like “an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases…to five by July 2007” and
withdrawal of U.S. forces “from vulnerable positions—cities, patrolling,
etc….so the Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take
responsibility for their country.”
Finally, Rumsfeld had begun to listen to his generals and
others who knew which end was up.
The hurdle? Bush and
Cheney were not about to follow Rumsfeld’s example in going wobbly. Like Robert McNamara at a similar juncture
during Vietnam, Rumsfeld had to be let go before he caused a president to “lose
a war.”
Acutely sensitive to this political bugaboo, Rumsfeld
included the following sentences at the end of the preferred-options section of
his Nov. 6 memo:
“Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is
doing so on a trial basis. This will
give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and
therefore not ‘lose.’”
(emphasis added)
The remainder of the memo listed “Below the Line—less
attractive options.” The top three in
the “less attractive” category were:
“--Continue on the current path.
--Move a large fraction of all
U.S. forces into Baghdad to attempt to control it.
--Increase Brigade Combat Teams
and U.S. forces substantially.”
In other words, a surge.
(It is a safe bet that people loyal to Rumsfeld at the National Security
Council alerted him to the surge-type of plans being hatched off line by
neo-conservative strategists, and that he and his generals wanted to bury them
well “below the line.”)
But in the White House’s view, Rumsfeld had outlived his
usefulness. One can assume that he
floated these trial balloons with Cheney and others, before he sent over the
actual memo on Nov. 6, 2006. What were
Bush and Cheney to do?
Exit Left
It was awkward. Right
up to the week before the mid-term election on Nov. 7, 2006, President Bush had
kept insisting that he intended to keep Rumsfeld in place for the next two
years. Suddenly, the president had to
deal with Rumsfeld’s apostasy.
The secretary of defense had strayed off the reservation and
he was putting his “above-the-line” recommendations in writing, no less. Rumsfeld had let reality get to him, together
with the very strong protestations of all senior uniformed officers save
one—the ambitious David Petraeus, fingered to become Petraeus ex machina for the White House. With the bemedaled Petraeus in the wings, the
White House just needed a new Pentagon chief who could be counted on to take
Rumsfeld’s place, do the White House’s bidding, and trot out Petraeus as
needed.
On Nov. 5, 2006, Bush had a one-on-one with Gates in
Crawford and the deal was struck. Forget
the torturously hammered-out recommendations of the Iraq Study
Group; forget what the military commanders were saying. Gates suddenly found the surge an outstanding
idea.
Well, not really.
That’s just what he let Bush believe.
Gates is second to none—not even Petraeus—in ambition and
self-promotion. He wanted to be
secretary of defense, to be back at center stage in Washington after nearly 14
years in exile from the big show. And so
he quickly agreed to tell Gen. Abizaid to retire; offer Gen. Casey a sinecure
as Army chief of staff, providing he kept his mouth shut; and eagle-scout his
way through Senate confirmation with the help of pundits like Ignatius
composing panegyrics in honor of “Gates the realist.”
So relieved were the Senators to be rid of the
hated-but-feared Rumsfeld, that the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on
Dec. 5 on Gates’ nomination had the aura of a pajama party (I was there). Gates told them bedtime stories. He said he
thought there were no new ideas to be had in addressing the conflict in Iraq,
and vowed to show “great deference to the judgment of generals.” (sic)
Trying to Explain the
Surge
It was hardly two years ago, but memories fade and the FCM,
of course, is no help in shedding light on what actually happened. Gates did his part in getting rid of Abizaid
and Casey, but the administration faltered embarrassingly in coming up with a
rationale to “justify” the surge. The
truth, of course, was not an option. The
White House could not exactly say, “We simply cannot live with the thought of
losing a war before we leave town.”
On Dec. 20, 2006, President Bush told the Washington Post that he was “inclined to
believe we do need to increase our troops, the Army and Marines.” He added, tellingly, “There’s got to be a
specific mission that can be accomplished with the addition of more troops.” And he said he would look to Gates, just back
from a quick trip to Baghdad, to help explain.
By way of preliminary explanation for the surge, President
Bush wandered back and forth between “ideological struggle” and “sectarian
violence.” He told the Post, “I’m going to keep repeating this
over and over again, that I believe we’re in an ideological struggle” and,
besides, “sectarian violence [is] obviously the real problem we face.” (sic)
When it became clear that those dogs wouldn’t hunt, the
White House justified the surge as necessary to give Iraqi government leaders
“breathing space” to work out their differences. Breathing space for the leading Iraqi
officials was the rationale offered by Bush in a major address on Jan 10, 2007. Pulling out all the stops, he raised the
specter of another 9/11, and spoke of the “decisive ideological struggle of our
time.”
Bush dismissed those who “are concerned that the Iraqis are
becoming too dependent on the United States” and those whose “solution is to
scale back America’s efforts in Baghdad—or announce a phased withdrawal of our
combat forces.” The president did warn
that the year ahead would be “bloody and violent, even if our strategy works.”
One would be tempted to laugh at Bush’s self-absorption—and
Gates’ ambition—were we not talking about the completely unnecessary killing of
over 1,000 U.S. troops—a quarter of all U.S. troops killed in this godforsaken
war/occupation.
In reality, by throwing 20,000-30,000 additional troops into
Baghdad, Bush and Cheney were the ones who got the two-year breathing space.
But what about that?
What about the thousand-plus U.S. troops killed during the surge? The tens of thousand Iraqis? The hundreds of thousands displaced from
their homes in the Baghdad area?
I fear the attitude was this: Nobody important will get killed; just a
bunch of Iraqis and GIs mostly from small-town and inner-city America. And, anyway, our soldiers and Marines all
volunteered, didn’t they? (I almost did
something violent to the last person I heard say that.)
Bush, Cheney, and Gates apparently deemed it a small price
to pay for enabling them to blame a successor administration for the inevitable
withdrawal from America’s first large-scale war of aggression.
And sure enough, in late 2006 a small group of
“neo-conservatives,” including members of Bush’s National Security Council,
came up with a plan called “Changing the Dynamics: Surge and Fight, Create
Breathing Space and Then Accelerate the Transition.” It called for a substantial troop increase in Baghdad and other hot spots.
Rumsfeld Out, Gates
In: Clear Sailing
The FCM missed it (surprise, surprise) but one did not have
to be a crackerjack intelligence analyst to see what was happening. At the time, Col. W. Patrick Lang, USA
(retired), and I wrote a piece (See http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/121906b.html,
Dec. 20, 2006) in which we exposed the chicanery and branded such a surge
strategy “nothing short of immoral, in view of the predicable troop losses and
the huge number of Iraqis who would meet violent injury and death.”
Surprisingly, we were joined by Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Oregon,
who explained to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos why Smith had said on the Senate
floor that U.S. policy on Iraq may be “criminal.”
“You can use any adjective you want, George. But I have long believed that in a military
context, when you do the same thing over and over again without a clear
strategy for victory, at the expense of your young people in arms, that is
dereliction. That is deeply immoral.”
Go West, Young Man
There are a host of reasons why Robert Gates should not be
asked to stay on by President-elect Obama.
Robert Parry has put together much of Gates’ history in Parry’s 2004
book, Secrecy & Privilege;
readers may also wish to see what former intelligence analysts and I, who knew
Gates at CIA, have written by going to Consortiumnews.com’s
Gates archive.
For me, Gates’ role in the unnecessary killing of still more
Americans and Iraqis is quite enough to disqualify him. I have known him for almost 40 years; he has
always been transparently ambitious, but he is also bright. He knew better; and he did it anyway.
One can only hope that, once President-elect Obama has time
to focus seriously on prospective cabinet appointments, he will discount advice
from those taken in by the cheerleading for Gates or from the kind of dullard
who suggested Obama finesse the FCM’s simplistic embrace of the surge by saying
it “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”
For Gates, Rumsfeld was an extremely easy act to
follow. But, at least in one sense,
Gates is worse than Rumsfeld, for Rumsfeld had finally begun to listen to the
right people and adjust. It now seems
the height of irony that the adjustments he proposed in his memo of Nov. 6,
2006 would have had most U.S. troops out of Iraq by now.
But can one portray Gates as worse than Rumsfeld across the
board? I think not. When you crank in torture, lying, and total
disrespect for law, Rumsfeld has the clear edge in moral turpitude.
Still, I suspect this matters little to the thousands now
dead because of the surge that Gates did so much to enable—and to the families
of the fallen.
Surely, it should not be too much to expect that
President-elect Obama find someone more suitable to select for secretary of
defense than an unprincipled chameleon like Gates.
Ray McGovern works
with Tell the Word, the publishing
arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour.
He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). McGovern
was Robert Gates’ branch chief at the start of Gates’ career as a CIA analyst;
he never asked McGovern for a letter of recommendation.
This article appeared
originally on Consortiumnews.com.