Strait is the Gates

Very interested by the Steve Inskeep interview with Robert Gates on NPR this morning, presenting a more "complex" view of the ex-secretary of defense and his book, which (full disclosure) I am totally not planning on reading. Under the discipline of the Inskeep long-form, I think I got a much more useful sense of what he has to say than the fragments of the book circulating around (except for this one): how he honestly sees himself and the president and how he can fairly be criticized.

Inskeep draws out a picture of Gates as a kind of struggle-in-progress among three remarkably independent sides: bureaucrat, Republican, and man. He is rather unusual in each of these respects.

As bureaucrat, Gates is by his own account skillful, dedicated, and territorial, and there's no reason to doubt him on that score. His much-reported criticism of the Obama administration has to do chiefly with his relation to the bureaucracy:

I had a lot of battles with those folks. And frankly, my attitudes were shaped by the fact that I worked in the White House on the National Security Council staff and as deputy national security adviser for nearly nine years under four presidents. And I had certain ideas about how the national security staff and how the White House staff ought to comport themselves in discussions on national security and military issues. And let's just say that the way it worked under — in the Obama White House was not anything like I had seen before. I had worked for probably three of the most significant and toughest national security advisers in our history: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft.

Note that he doesn't name the fourth, George W. Bush's second national security adviser Stephen Hadley, the man chiefly responsible for the Nigerien yellowcake fiasco whose promotion to the post after Condoleezza Rice became secretary of state was such an astonishment. Hadley, you might think, would be something of a counterexample to allegations that the Obama White House was the most politicized Gates ever worked for, but he isn't. That's because Gates has something in mind quite different from partisanship:

there were things that went on in the Obama White House that, under those three guys, I am confident would have been a firing offense, such as direct calls from NSC staff members to four-star generals and so on. That just wouldn't have been allowed.

Sur les routes de France. Via.

Hadley was a scheming neocon and an incompetent, but he was above all a team player, one of Rice's Vulcans, who loyally laid himself beneath the bus wheels before they had to throw him there, and to Gates he was not "politicized" at all. (His reward is his position in a certain international consulting firm going by the name RiceHadleyGates, and those who wonder why Gates seems to treat the Obama administration more harshly than Bush's might want to contemplate that fact, which press coverage of the book doesn't seem to be mentioning.*) Obama's NSC people, on the other hand, had the unforgivable nerve to bypass Gates, and that's more than Gates as observer is able to tolerate. Not like he had any personal issues here or anything.

As a Republican, Gates is clearly one of the Scowcroft-era "responsible" generation, which would never have mounted horror shows like the Iraq War, any more than Field Marshall von Hindenburg would have considered rounding up Jews in prison camps and murdering them (and thus is not in any way responsible for these disasters, oh no, not in the least). He was an infinitely better secretary of defense in the George W. administration than the unspeakable turd Rumsfeld, and in a normal world he would have been an exceptionally good choice for Obama's defense secretary, with his ideological realism and willingness to focus on questions of implementation; he could have influenced congressional Republicans to cooperate with the administration. Of course our world is not normal and congressional Republicans couldn't be influenced if Jesus came down and begged them, but it may turn out in the end that Gates was really pretty good in the job anyway. But he could not work with Joe Biden:

First of all, I think it's fair to say that particularly on Afghanistan, the vice president was my — he and I were on opposite sides of the fence on this issue. And he was in there advising the president every day. He was, I think, stoking the president's suspicion of the military. But the other side of it is, frankly, I believe [that he was wrong on every issue]. The vice president, when he was a senator — a very new senator, voted against the aid package for South Vietnam, and the — that was part of the deal when we pulled out of South Vietnam to try and help them survive. He said that when the — when the Shah fell in Iran in 2009 — 1979, rather — that that was a step forward for progress toward human rights in Iran. He opposed virtually every element of President Reagan's defense buildup. He voted against the B-1, the B-2, the MX and so on. He voted against the first Gulf War. So on a number of these major issues, I just — I frankly, over a long period of time felt that he had been on the wrong — he'd been — I think he had been wrong.

Vice President Biden has built himself a pretty odd reputation over the last five years or so, as an immensely likable but somewhat buffoonish guy, whereas as we learned recently from George Packer he is at least in some connections not a nice guy at all (I'm still sad about this), and it is worth mentioning that he is also not a buffoon, but one of the upper echelon's most serious and accomplished students of foreign policy, who was in fact right on an amazing range of issues since 1973, including all the ones Gates lists, or wrong in a really interesting way (as when he advocated the tripartition of Iraq at a time when almost nobody in Washington realized that Iraqi Arabs and Kurds, and Arab Sunni and Shi'a, had a problem getting along with each other). It is this consistent rightness, not his being a Democrat, that Gates really can't stand.

Illustration by Clément Lefèvre for Boris Vian's Le Déserteur. 

On Gates as a man, I was really thunderstruck by what he had to say about the circumstances that led him to resign from the Obama administration:

GATES: Well, I was determined that these young people would not just become statistics for me. And so I started out by handwriting parts of the — of the condolence letters. And then — and even then that wasn't enough, I felt. And I so then I started asking that every time one of these packets came to me, that it'd have a picture of the — of the soldier or sailor, airman or Marine who'd been killed, along with the hometown news so that I knew, you know, what their coaches and their parents and their brothers and sisters and teachers were saying about them, so I felt like I had some personal knowledge about each one of them. And I would write those condolence letters every evening.

INSKEEP: And that became difficult after a while?

GATES: It didn't take too long. I think that quite honestly, in the — in those evening sessions, writing the condolence letters, there probably wasn't a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn't — when I didn't weep.

That touch—of his asking for the pictures and the hometown papers and the quotes from coaches—is so much what I wish every war manager, from the colonels to messieurs les présidents, would do: but it apparently makes you unfit for service. Which sounds like a lesson: le monde en a assez.

*Bob Woodward does mention it at the very bottom of his Wapo article on the book, alongside noting Gates's presidency of the Boy Scouts of America, but I don't think anybody has remarked that it could have any effect on the way Gates writes about Rice's and Hadley's performance in the Bush years.