In my perspective, the book lacks of Benjamin Netanyahu's prologue and his dedication to the
Tea-Republican Party: the eve of the next Presidential Election...*
11:29 AM - 12 Jan 14 · Details
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3:57 PM - 12 Jan 14from Salina Cruz, Oaxaca · Details
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2:31 PM - 12 Jan 14 · Details11:29 AM - 12 Jan 14 · Details
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3:57 PM - 12 Jan 14from Salina Cruz, Oaxaca · Details
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T16Jsw0028g
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"Robert Gates, former defense
secretary, offers harsh critique of Obama’s leadership in ‘Duty’
By Bob
Woodward, Published: January 7
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.”
Obama,
after months of contentious discussion with Gates and other top advisers,
deployed 30,000 more troops in a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a
phased withdrawal beginning in mid-2011. “I never doubted Obama’s support for
the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes.
As
a candidate, Obama had made plain his opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion
while embracing the Afghanistan war as a necessary response to the 2001
terrorist attacks on the United States, requiring even more military resources
to succeed. In Gates’s highly emotional account, Obama remains uncomfortable
with the inherited wars and distrustful of the military that is providing him
options. Their different worldviews produced a rift that, at least for Gates,
became personally wounding and impossible to repair.
In
a statement Tuesday evening, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin
Hayden said Obama “deeply appreciates Bob Gates’ service as Secretary of
Defense, and his lifetime of service to our country.”
“As
has always been the case, the President welcomes differences of view among his
national security team, which broaden his options and enhance our policies,”
Hayden said in the statement. “The President wishes Secretary Gates well as he
recovers from his recent injury, and discusses his book.” Gates fractured his
first vertebra last week in a fall at his home in Washington state.
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’s
severe criticism is even more surprising — some might say contradictory —
because toward the end of “Duty,”
he says of Obama’s chief Afghanistan policies, “I believe Obama was right in
each of these decisions.” That particular view is not a universal one; like
much of the debate about the best path to take in Afghanistan, there is
disagreement on how well the surge strategy worked, including among military
officials.
The
sometimes bitter tone in Gates’s 594-page account contrasts sharply with the
even-tempered image that he cultivated during his many years of government
service, including stints at the CIA and National Security Council. That image
endured through his nearly five years in the Pentagon’s top job, beginning in
President George W. Bush’s second term and continuing after Obama asked him to
remain in the post. In “Duty,” Gates describes his outwardly calm demeanor as a
facade. Underneath, he writes, he was frequently “seething” and “running out of
patience on multiple fronts.”
The
book, published by Knopf, is scheduled for release Jan. 14.
Gates,
a Republican, 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.”
In
her statement, Hayden said Obama “disagrees with Secretary Gates’ assessment”
of the vice president.
“From
his leadership on the Balkans in the Senate, to his efforts to end the war in
Iraq, Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time, and has
helped advance America’s leadership in the world,” Hayden said. “President
Obama relies on his good counsel every day.”
Gates
is 70, nearly 20 years older than Obama. He has worked for every president
going back to Richard Nixon, with the exception of Bill Clinton. Throughout his
government career, he was known for his bipartisan detachment, the consummate
team player. “Duty” is likely to provide ammunition for those who believe it is
risky for a president to fill such a key Cabinet post with a holdover from the
opposition party.
He
writes, “I have tried to be fair in describing actions and motivations of
others.” He seems well aware that Obama and his aides will not see it that way.
While
serving as defense secretary, Gates gave Obama high marks, saying privately in
the summer of 2010 that the president is “very thoughtful and analytical, but
he is also quite decisive.” He added, “I think we have a similar approach to
dealing with national security issues.”
Obama
echoed Gates’s comments in a July 10, 2010, interview for my book “Obama’s
Wars.” The president said: “Bob Gates has, I think, served me
extraordinarily well. And part of the reason is, you know, I’m not sure if he
considers this an insult or a compliment, but he and I actually think a lot
alike, in broad terms.”
During
that interview, Obama said he believed he “had garnered confidence and trust in
Gates.” In “Duty,” Gates complains repeatedly that confidence and trust were
what he felt was lacking in his dealings with Obama and his team. “Why did I
feel I was constantly at war with everybody, as I have detailed in these
pages?” he writes. “Why was I so often angry? Why did I so dislike being back
in government and in Washington?”
His
answer is that “the broad dysfunction in Washington wore me down, especially as
I tried to maintain a public posture of nonpartisan calm, reason and
conciliation.”
His
lament about Washington was not the only factor contributing to his
unhappiness. Gates also writes of the toll taken by the difficulty of
overseeing wars against terrorism and insurgencies in countries such as Iraq
and Afghanistan. Such wars do not end with a clear surrender; Gates
acknowledges having ambiguous feelings about both conflicts. For example, 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.
Three
years later, Bush recruited Gates — who had served his father for 15 months as
CIA director in the early 1990s — to take on the defense job. The first half of
“Duty” covers those final two years in the Bush administration. Gates reveals
some disagreements from that period, but none as fundamental or as personal as
those he describes with Obama and his aides in the book’s second half.
“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.”
He
writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in
Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . .
The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been
political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me,
was as surprising as it was dismaying.”
Earlier
in the book, he describes Hillary Clinton in the sort of glowing terms that
might be used in a political endorsement. “I found her smart, idealistic but
pragmatic, tough-minded, indefatigable, funny, a very valuable colleague, and a
superb representative of the United States all over the world,” he wrote.
March
3, 2011
“Duty”
reflects the memoir genre, declaring that this is how the writer saw it, warts
and all, including his own. That focus tends to give short shrift to the
fuller, established record. For example, in recounting the difficult
discussions that led to the Afghan surge strategy in 2009, Gates makes no
reference to the six-page “terms sheet” that Obama drafted at the end, laying
out the rationale for the surge and withdrawal timetable. Obama asked everyone
involved to sign on, signaling agreement.
According
to the meeting notes of another participant, Gates is quoted as telling Obama,
“You sound the bugle . . . Mr. President, and Mike [Mullen, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff] and I will be the first to charge the hill.”
Gates
does not include such a moment in “Duty.” He picks up the story a bit later,
after Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the central commander in charge of both the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars, made remarks to the press suggesting he was not
comfortable with setting a fixed date to start withdrawal.
At
a March 3, 2011, National Security Council meeting, Gates writes, the president
opened with a “blast.” Obama criticized the military for “popping off in the
press” and said he would push back hard against any delay in beginning the
withdrawal.
According
to Gates, Obama concluded, “ ‘If I believe I am being gamed . . .’ and left the
sentence hanging there with the clear implication the consequences would be
dire.”
Gates
continues: “I was pretty upset myself. I thought implicitly accusing” Petraeus,
and perhaps Mullen and Gates himself, “of gaming him in front of thirty people
in the Situation Room was inappropriate, not to mention highly disrespectful of
Petraeus. As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander,
can’t stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] 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.”
‘Breaches
of faith’
Lack
of trust is a major thread in Gates’s account, along with his unsparing
criticism of Obama’s aides. At times, the two threads intertwine. For example,
after the devastating 2010 Haitian earthquake that had left tens of thousands
dead, Gates met with Obama and Donilon, the deputy national security adviser,
about disaster relief.
Donilon
was “complaining about how long we were taking,” Gates writes. “Then he went
too far, questioning in front of the president and a roomful of people whether
General [Douglas] Fraser [head of the U.S. Southern Command] was competent to
lead this effort. I’ve rarely been angrier in the Oval Office than I was at
that moment. . . . My initial instinct was to storm out, telling the president
on the way that he didn’t need two secretaries of defense. It took every bit of
my self-discipline to stay seated on the sofa.”
Gates
confirms a previously reported statement in which he told Obama’s first
national security adviser, retired Marine Gen. James Jones, that he thought
Donilon would be a “disaster” if he succeeded Jones (as Donilon did in late
2010). Gates writes that Obama quizzed him about this characterization; a
one-on-one meeting with Donilon followed, and that “cleared the air,” according
to Gates.
His
second year with Obama proved as tough as the first. “For me, 2010 was a year
of continued conflict and a couple of important White House breaches of faith,”
he writes.
The
first, he says, was Obama’s decision to seek the repeal of the “don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy toward gays serving in the military. Though Gates says he
supported the decision, there had been months and months of debate, with
details still to work out. On one day’s notice, Obama informed Gates and Mullen
that he would announce his request for a repeal of the law. Obama had
“blindsided Admiral Mullen and me,” Gates writes.
Similarly,
in a battle over defense spending, “I was extremely angry with President
Obama,” Gates writes. “I felt he had breached faith with me . . . on the budget
numbers.” As with “don’t ask, don’t tell,” “I felt that agreements with the
Obama White House were good for only as long as they were politically
convenient.”
Gates
acknowledges forthrightly in “Duty” that he did not reveal his dismay. “I never
confronted Obama directly over what I (as well as [Hillary] Clinton, [then-CIA
Director Leon] Panetta, and others) saw as the president’s determination that
the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and
even operations. His White House was by far the most centralized and
controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and
Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.”
It
got so bad during internal debates over whether to intervene in Libya in 2011
that Gates says he felt compelled to deliver a “rant” because the White House
staff was “talking about military options with the president without Defense
being involved.”
Gates
says his instructions to the Pentagon were: “Don’t give the White House staff
and [national security staff] too much information on the military options.
They don’t understand it, and ‘experts’ like Samantha Power will decide when we
should move militarily.” Power, then on the national security staff and now
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been a strong advocate for
humanitarian intervention.
Another
time, after Donilon and Biden tried to pass orders to Gates, he told the two,
“The last time I checked, neither of you are in the chain of command,” and said
he expected to get orders directly from Obama.
Life
at the top was no picnic, Gates writes. He did little or no socializing. “Every
evening I could not wait to get home, get my office homework out of the way,
write condolence letters to the families of the fallen, pour a stiff drink,
wolf down a frozen dinner or carry out,” since his wife, Becky, often remained
at their home in Washington state.
“I
got up at five every morning to run two miles around the Mall in Washington,
past the World War II, Korean, and Vietnam memorials, and in front of the
Lincoln Memorial. And every morning before dawn, I would ritually look up at
that stunning white statue of Lincoln, say good morning, and sadly ask him, How
did you do it?”
The
memoir’s title comes from a quote, “God help me to do my duty,” that Gates says
he kept on his desk. The quote has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln’s war
secretary, Edwin Stanton.
At
his confirmation hearings to be Bush’s defense secretary in late 2006, Gates
told the senators that he had not “come back to Washington to be a bump on a
log and not say exactly what I think, and to speak candidly and, frankly,
boldly to people at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue about what I believe and
what I think needs to be done.”
But
Gates says he did not speak his mind when the committee chairman listed the
problems he would face as secretary. “I remember sitting at the witness table
listening to this litany of woe and thinking, “What the hell am I doing here? I
have walked right into the middle of a category-five shitstorm. It was the
first of many, many times I would sit at the witness table thinking something
very different from what I was saying.”
“Duty”
offers the familiar criticism of Congress and its culture, describing it as
“truly ugly.” Gates’s cold feelings toward the legislative branch stand in
stark contrast to his warmth for the military. He repeatedly describes his
affection for the troops, especially those in combat.
Gates
wanted to quit at the end of 2010 but agreed to stay at Obama’s urging, finally
leaving in mid-2011. He later joined a consulting firm with two of Bush’s
closest foreign policy advisers — former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice
and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser during Bush’s second term.
The firm is called RiceHadleyGates. In October, he became president-elect of
the Boy Scouts of America.
Gates
writes, “I did not enjoy being secretary of defense,” or as he e-mailed one
friend while still serving, “People have no idea how much I detest this job.”
Evelyn
Duffy contributed to this report.
"
"READ
MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/robert-gates-former-defense-secretary-offers-harsh-critique-of-obamas-leadership-in-duty/2014/01/07/6a6915b2-77cb-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html
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3:45 PM - 14 Jan 14 · Details
3:46 PM - 14 Jan 14 · Details
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http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/obama-photo.html
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http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2014/01/10/muestra-fotografica-acusa-los-perjuicios-de-chevron-en-ecuador/
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SCOTLAND SHOULD NOT BE COMPLICIT IN WAR CRIMES, GENOCIDE AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: THE INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM SHOULD NOT HAVE ANY ADJECTIVE...!
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2011/06/scotland-should-not-be-complicit-in-war.html
---
IN @WIKILEAKS I TRUST... Y EL OSCILAMIENTO ENTRE 'LO MÁS' y 'LO MENOS'...
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2013/10/in-wikileaks-i-trust.html
---
"REAPARECE EL COMANDANTE"
"LANZA EZLN NUEVO LLAMADO A LA REBELDÍA"
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3:45 PM - 14 Jan 14 · Details
3:46 PM - 14 Jan 14 · Details
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http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/obama-photo.html
---
http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2014/01/10/muestra-fotografica-acusa-los-perjuicios-de-chevron-en-ecuador/
---
SCOTLAND SHOULD NOT BE COMPLICIT IN WAR CRIMES, GENOCIDE AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: THE INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM SHOULD NOT HAVE ANY ADJECTIVE...!
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2011/06/scotland-should-not-be-complicit-in-war.html
---
IN @WIKILEAKS I TRUST... Y EL OSCILAMIENTO ENTRE 'LO MÁS' y 'LO MENOS'...
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2013/10/in-wikileaks-i-trust.html
---
"REAPARECE EL COMANDANTE"
Se reanudan en Cuba las negociaciones de paz entre el Gobierno colombiano y las FARC
---
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Noam Chomsky: "EE.UU. es el principal Estado terrorista en el mundo"Texto completo en: http://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/view/85161-eeuu-principal-terrorista
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Cada historia posee sus propios héroes y/o heroínas, sus ángeles y sus demonios... FIDEIIUS.
Each story has its own heroesand/or heroines, its angels, and demons... FIDEIIUS.
Each story has its own heroesand/or heroines, its angels, and demons... FIDEIIUS.
The universe is not a supermarket, nor a store... Fideiius
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"Chávez, en la gran tradición de militares de izquierda en AL, empezando por Cárdenas"
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2014/01/02/index.php?section=mundo&article=032n1mun
"Chávez, en la gran tradición de militares de izquierda en AL, empezando por Cárdenas"
"LA INTERNET, BAJO OCUPACIÓN MILITAR DE EU: ASSANGE"
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2013/12/cubadebate-lo-mas-leido-y-comentado-en.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/world/asia/north-korea-says-uncle-of-executed.html?_r=0
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2013/12/cubadebate-lo-mas-leido-y-comentado-en.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqz9XvAbbWE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLkjMLdLf3s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KGRnm3eJoE
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2013/12/cubadebate-lo-mas-leido-y-comentado-en.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/world/asia/north-korea-says-uncle-of-executed.html?_r=0
http://fideiius.blogspot.com/2013/12/cubadebate-lo-mas-leido-y-comentado-en.html
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