Robert Gates's failure of duty
Fallout from the former Defense secretary's book can only harm him
By Sarah Chayes, LA Times
January 12, 2014
In a dozen years of war, Americans have grown used to improvised explosive devices. The detonations have rocked the streets of Kabul and Baghdad — and also of Washington. Only, in Washington, the bombshells appear in print.
The latest domestic blast, a diatribe called "Duty" by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, seems to have startled even the dean of White House correspondents. "It is rare for a former Cabinet member," wrote Bob Woodward in the Washington Post, "let alone a Defense secretary ... to publish such an antagonistic portrait of a sitting president."
Yet, as can happen with IEDs, the shrapnel from this one may wound its originator more severely than its intended targets. From the excerpts of the memoir that have been released, Gates emerges as a petulant, inhibited man who ill-served his president and the national interest by keeping his anger and concerns bottled up instead of raising them in person, at the time when it might have done his country some good.
His criticism of President Obama's handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, moreover, is fixated on U.S. troops and on executive branch infighting. It fails to examine the most profound flaw in the conduct of the wars: the lack of an overarching policy within which troop deployments might have made sense.
(More here.)
By Sarah Chayes, LA Times
January 12, 2014
In a dozen years of war, Americans have grown used to improvised explosive devices. The detonations have rocked the streets of Kabul and Baghdad — and also of Washington. Only, in Washington, the bombshells appear in print.
The latest domestic blast, a diatribe called "Duty" by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, seems to have startled even the dean of White House correspondents. "It is rare for a former Cabinet member," wrote Bob Woodward in the Washington Post, "let alone a Defense secretary ... to publish such an antagonistic portrait of a sitting president."
Yet, as can happen with IEDs, the shrapnel from this one may wound its originator more severely than its intended targets. From the excerpts of the memoir that have been released, Gates emerges as a petulant, inhibited man who ill-served his president and the national interest by keeping his anger and concerns bottled up instead of raising them in person, at the time when it might have done his country some good.
His criticism of President Obama's handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, moreover, is fixated on U.S. troops and on executive branch infighting. It fails to examine the most profound flaw in the conduct of the wars: the lack of an overarching policy within which troop deployments might have made sense.
(More here.)
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