Thread: The Danger of Keeping Robert Gates

The Danger of Keeping Robert Gates

by Robert Parry

Global Research, January 4, 2009
consortiumnews.com - 2008-11-13


Press reports say Barack Obama may retain George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates as a gesture to war-time continuity, bipartisanship and respect for the Washington insider community, which has embraced Gates as something of a new Wise Man.

However, if Obama does keep Gates on, the new President will be employing someone who embodies many of the worst elements of U.S. national security policy over the past three decades, including responsibility for what Obama himself has fingered as a chief concern, “politicized intelligence.â€

Of course Obama is keeping Gates -- as if Gates doesn't have all the Defense Intelligence unit's information necessary to keep himself in an appointed post!!! With our whacky Homeland Security bureaucracy super-imposed on CIA and FBI and DoD Intelligence and Secretary of State databases, who is in a better position to pull up information on anyone, anywhere.

The flip side of the coin about the politicization of intelligence among Reagan admirers would posit that it was intentional and that it induced the talk of the "Star Wars" defense shield build-up, brought about "plausible" Congressional support for that proposal which could be mentioned in the press, and that the administration was well aware that USSR was economically a Third World proposition which would break its own back trying to keep up with the U.S. militarily. And that the expectable USSR efforts to keep up with defense spending would stir up massive discontent among people in the broken-down "consumer economy" of the USSR, resulting in the more complete breakdown and breaking apart of the "evil empire" when it finally fell ...

The Pope humiliated the USSR by aligning with the Solidarity movement in Poland and Lech, with his outspoken criticism that the "workers state" under Communism was anything but a Utopia for workers. Reagan humiliated the USSR with a "Keep up with the Joneses" threat of military defense from space, and the "Tear Down This Wall" rhetoric in Berlin.

So one version of the story would say that the Cold War could have been ended earlier with unbiased intelligence and earlier diplomacy initiatives. Another version of the story would say that the Cold War was ended "more decisively" by putting the heat on over the same span of years during the 1980's when Reagan was in office.

As far as what happened with Rumsfeld's departure and Gates' arrival at DoD, every account that I can recall from the time was that we weren't "winning" in Iraq and that the objective, having gotten ourselves into that misbegotten mess in the first place, and finding Bush/Rumsfeld overruling true military wise men who had advised as early as spring 2003 about what the true manpower needs and costs were going to be, was to not repeat Vietnam with an abject failure amid withdrawal. Rather, it was going to be to surge, win, and then get out with some "permanent bases of operation" remaining behind.

Problem that was more accentuated in Iraq than it was in a place like (oh, say) South Korea, is that an occupying force of a largely Christian Western nation that relies on foreign oil in a Muslim country that produces a lot of oil was going to find a lot more resentment directed at the occupiers.

I don't agree with the U.S. having gotten into Iraq in the first place. The better reaction to 9/11 would have been to shore up our own Sovereign Nation with attention to borders and seaports. The better reaction to 9/11 would have been to collaborate more with Western democracies about the "waves of immigration" into Europe and the U.S. which have allowed for "hotbeds of discontent" to arise right inside the borders of freedom-loving democracies (theirs) and constitutional republics (ours). We have a weaker military now than in 2001 because it's been over-extended, and a weaker economy now because it's been over-extended too.

Ron Paul is right when he calls upon the GOP to remember its historical stance back in the Robert Taft era that it should be the party of non-interventionism. We are stronger as a nation when we stick to concerning ourselves about the state of our nation, and not when we try to play American Cops for the rest of the world, responding to every 911 call from around the globe, and inventing a few 911 calls of our own.