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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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November 9th, 2006 - Robert Gates,
a Cautious Player From a Past Bush Team |
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Robert Gates, a Cautious
Player From a Past Bush Team By Scott Shane New York Times November 9, 2006 Washington, Nov. 8 - In
choosing Robert M. Gates as his next defense secretary, President Bush
reached back to an earlier era in Republican foreign policy, one marked more
by caution and pragmatism than that of the neoconservatives who have shaped
the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and confrontations with Iran and North
Korea. Soft-spoken but
tough-minded, Mr. Gates, 63, is in many ways the antithesis of Donald H.
Rumsfeld, the brash leader he would replace. He has been privately critical
of the administration’s failure to execute its military and political plans
for Iraq, and he has spent the last six months quietly debating new
approaches to the war, as a member of the Iraq Study Group run by James A. Baker
III and Lee H. Hamilton. Mr. Gates last served in
Washington 13 years ago, and Mr. Bush made clear on Wednesday that he
regarded his nominee as someone who would bring new perspective to the final
two years of his tenure. It was under Mr. Bush’s
father that Mr. Gates first rose to influence, as deputy national security
adviser and then director of central intelligence. He was not part of the
group that advised the current President Bush during his 2000 campaign, and
he has publicly questioned the administration’s approach to Iran, saying in a
2004 report for the Council on Foreign Relations that its refusal to talk to
the Tehran government was ultimately self-defeating. “This is a signal that there
will be a major effort to avoid confrontation on national security issues,”
said Dov Zakheim, a former senior official in Mr. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon who
left the administration in 2004. He described Mr. Gates as “a pragmatist and
a realist” who would be “no lightning rod.” A longtime Soviet analyst
who spent two decades at the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. Gates served as
deputy to Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, during the
administration of George H. W. Bush. There, he worked closely with Mr. Baker
and Condoleezza Rice. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, now the C.I.A. director, also
served on the staff of the National Security Council at the time. Mr. Gates was confirmed in
1991 as director of central intelligence after a bruising confirmation fight
in which subordinates alleged that he had politicized reporting on the Soviet
Union. He has spent the last 13 years outside of government, in lucrative
business posts and at Texas A&M University, first as dean of the George
H. W. Bush School of Government and since 2002 as president. Only 22 months ago, Mr.
Gates turned down President Bush’s invitation to become the first director of
national intelligence. After agonizing for more than two weeks, Mr. Gates
later recounted, he decided during a tearful, late-night walk that he “could
not leave” the university to return to Washington. But since March, as a member
of Mr. Baker’s Iraq Study Group, Mr. Gates has been pondering the central
defense policy quandary facing the administration. Summoned to the
president’s ranch over the weekend and offered the defense secretary’s job,
this time Mr. Gates said yes. “Because so many of
America’s sons and daughters in our armed forces are in harm’s way, I did not
hesitate when the president asked me to return to duty,” Mr. Gates said at
the White House ceremony on Wednesday. Zbigniew Brzezinski,
national security adviser under President Carter and co-author with Mr. Gates
of the report on Iran policy, said he hoped the appointment would mean “a
major corrective in American policy toward the Middle East.” Born and raised in Wichita,
Kan., Robert Michael Gates, whose father sold wholesale auto parts, became an
Eagle Scout (he is currently president of the National Eagle Scout
Association) and studied European history at the College of William and Mary.
He was recruited by the intelligence agency while completing a master’s
degree at Indiana University and in 1974 finished a doctorate at Georgetown
University, writing his dissertation on Soviet views of China. He first served on the
National Security Council staff from 1974 to 1979 under Presidents Nixon,
Ford and Carter. After returning to the C.I.A., he was given a series of
pivotal jobs by Director William Casey, including deputy director and
chairman of the National Intelligence Council. If Mr. Gates was initially
reluctant to return to Washington, it may be because he knows what it means
to be at the center of political crossfire. First picked by President Reagan
in 1987 to succeed Mr. Casey, Mr. Gates withdrew in the face of senators’
concern that he had not been candid about his knowledge of the Iran-contra
affair. In 1991, re-nominated by the
first President Bush, he faced a grueling confirmation involving not only
Iran-contra but also some colleagues’ accusation that he had skewed
intelligence reporting on the Soviet Union to suit the Reagan White House.
Mr. Gates was confirmed, 61 to 31, as the youngest C.I.A. director in history
and oversaw the agency’s initial effort to tackle post-cold-war threats. He later defended his C.I.A.
record in a 1996 memoir, “From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of
Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War.” On Wednesday, a C.I.A.
subordinate who had clashed with him offered a harsh assessment. “This is not
a person with a history of telling truth to power,” said the former
subordinate, Melvin A. Goodman, a Soviet analyst from 1966 to 1990. Mr.
Goodman called Mr. Gates a micromanager and “not a big-picture person,”
though he also called him “a hard-working, disciplined person who’s totally
loyal to his bosses.” David Boren, a former
Democratic chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, had warm praise for
Mr. Gates’s service. “I found him to be highly intelligent, an excellent
manager of the large and complex intelligence community, and totally
bipartisan in his approach,” Mr. Boren said in a statement. Bobby R. Inman, a former
C.I.A. deputy director and National Security Agency director and an old
friend of Mr. Gates, called him “a good listener” who, “after he makes up his
mind, is very decisive.” “He’s impatient with those
whose minds don’t move as fast as his does, but he’s not arrogant,” Mr. Inman
said. He compared Mr. Gates’s nomination to President Johnson’s choice of
Clark Clifford, another unflappable old Washington hand, to replace the
lightning rod Robert S. McNamara as defense secretary in 1968 at the height
of the Vietnam war. A hint of the approach Mr.
Gates might bring to the job, drawing on his experience at the end of the
cold war, can be found in his remarks in 2004 at the release of the Council
on Foreign Relations report, called “Iran: Time for a New Approach.” “One of our recommendations
is that the U.S. government lift its ban in terms of nongovernmental
organizations being able to operate in Iran,” Mr. Gates said. “Greater
interaction between Iranians and the rest of the world,” he said, “sets the
stage for the kind of internal change that we all hope will happen there.” David E. Sanger contributed
reporting. Copyright 2006 The New York
Times Company External link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/washington/09gates.html |