In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes
harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to
the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the
president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the
war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense
secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into
combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course
he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not
outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”
It is rare for a former Cabinet member, let alone a defense secretary
occupying a central position in the chain of command, to publish such an
antagonistic portrait of a sitting president.
Gates writes about Obama with an ambivalence that he does not
resolve, praising him as “a man of personal integrity” even as he faults
his leadership. Though the book simmers with disappointment in Obama,
it reflects outright contempt for Vice President Biden and many of
Obama’s top aides.
Biden is accused of “poisoning the well”
against the military leadership. Thomas Donilon, initially Obama’s
deputy national security adviser, and then-Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the
White House coordinator for the wars, are described as regularly
engaged in “aggressive, suspicious, and sometimes condescending and
insulting questioning of our military leaders.”
“All too early in the [Obama] administration,” he writes, “suspicion
and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials
— including the president and vice president — became a big problem for
me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief
and his military leaders.”
Gates offers a catalogue of various
meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time,
including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton that he calls “remarkable.” (Full Story)
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