Why on earth would anyone pay any attention to Village hack Bob Gates? (Just 'cause he wrote some crummy book?)

UPDATE: Who knew what about the
fall of the "Evil Empire"? (See below)


The thing to remember, looking at this portion of Wikipedia's table of U.S. SecDefs (click on it to enlarge), is whom Bob Gates replaced -- as if anyone could replace Donald Rumsfeld.

by Ken

Like most of our readers, we spend a lot of time here at DWT criticizing President Obama. Goodness knows, there's plenty to criticize. What's so frustrating, though, is that nearly all the time the criticism that gains media traction comes from the ranks of professional liars and crackpots -- though a hat tip is certainly in order for the amateurs in both fields, who have worked tirelessly at twisting actual stories beyond recogniton or just making stories up.

Why would you buy this book?

So now the president is under attack from Bob Gates, and it's all in the headlines. Even though, by my guess, probably at least 90 percent of Americans -- no, let's say 95 percent -- couldn't pick the guy out of a lineup, and probably at least 70 percent couldn't tell you who the hell he is, or was, or will be.

What whoever-the-hell-he-is did was write a book that says bad things about President Obama. Okay, there's one other detail that's relevant, or maybe two. First, he served as secretary of defense for the first two and a half years of the Obama Administration, as a holdover from the previous administration; and second, he has a Village-certified résumé. (I throw this last point in to distinguish him from the cadre of out-and-out loonies who churn out Obama-hating books under the imprints of the publishing arm of the Right-Wing Noise Machine.)

But why on earth would anyone pay any attention to anything this dope has to say? His charge against the president, as I understand it, is that while Gates was secdef, the president didn't support his own Afghanistan policy enthusiastically enough -- that the president in fact "had doubts" about that policy. Gasp!

By which I think we may infer that Secretary Gates didn't have doubts about the policy, in which case what he's really telling us is that he himself is a halfwit. Isn't he? Is there anyone with a working brain who didn't have doubts about our Afghanistan policy? I mean, what the hell was our Afghanistan policy? Really, what did we think we were going to accomplish, and exactly how did we think we were going to accomplish it?

It doesn't take a genius on Life in the Village to get a glimmering of what's going on here. Gates, having for some reason gotten a contract to write such a book, had to deal with Afghanistan, to explain how it was that on his watch as secdef so much money and manpower was poured into Afghanistan to no earthly effect, unless you count further corrupting the country, which was in no way short on corruption of its own. So obviously the explanation has to be, uh, um, er . . . it was somebody else's fault. And why not the president himself, for having failed to don a cheerleader's suit and go out and persuade both the American people and our fighters in Afghanistan that, you know, victory is just around the corner, high five!

Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn here was stated explicitly last week by our pal Washington Post "Loop"-master Al Kamen, in a piece called "Gates of Wrath":

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates's controversial  new memoir, "Duty," contains an explicit and useful warning to future presidents:

In your first term, never, ever appoint someone to a senior post that will be his or her last job in government. You will likely come to regret it -- a sentiment President Obama, Vice President Biden and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton may be feeling quite keenly these days. (The advice is especially important when that appointee is not a member of your political party or has no personal relationship with you.)

Second term? No problem. Secretary of State John Kerry, for example, can say whatever he wants in his memoir, and who cares? Obama will be out of office. And Obama's book could well come out before Kerry's.

Al also raises a rather important point that had been made by Post foreign affairs blogger Max Fisher:

[O]ur colleague Max Fisher notes that Gates, as the CIA's top Kremlinologist back in the Reagan administration, was wrong about the most "important issue he ever faced": whether Gorbachev might be a different kind of Soviet leader and worth dealing with to try to end the Cold War.

Gates strongly, and wrongly, insisted that Gorbachev was cut from the same cloth as his Soviet predecessors.  (This might explain why, if memory serves, Gorbachev appeared to refuse to shake hands with him at the Kremlin when Gates traveled there with Secretary of State James Baker  back in 1990. When Baker introduced Gates, Gorbachev said something like: "I know who you are.")

The Fisher piece seems to me worth a closer look. Here he is taking off from the now-much-circulated Gates claim in the book that Vice President Joe Biden was "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."

I am not appropriately positioned to evaluate Gates's positions on "every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." But I can tell you how he performed on the single most important one he ever confronted: ending the Cold War. He was, quite simply, dead wrong.

Could you pick him out of a lineup?

Back in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took over as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the United States faced a really big dilemma. Gorbachev professed to be a reformer. Should the United States work with him to reduce nuclear weapons, ease the U.S.-Soviet proxy battles that were at that point directly responsible for a number of deadly conflicts around the world and, just maybe, try to end the Cold War? This wasn't just a major, difficult question: It would turn out to be one of the most important U.S. foreign policy decisions in decades.

President Ronald Reagan eventually came around to the idea that, yes, he could and should work with Gorbachev. He was persuaded by, among others, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously said that Gorbachev was a man the West could do business with.

But Reagan had to overcome the fierce opposition of a top CIA Kremlinologist and eventual CIA director named Robert M. Gates, who maintained for years that Gorbachev was no reformer, that he was not to be trusted and that Reagan would be walking into a Soviet ploy.

Quite simply, Gates was wrong, overruled by Reagan, and the world was better off for it. Here is the beginning of Gates's campaign against Gorbachev, as chronicled in David Hoffman's Pulitzer Prize-winning history, "The Dead Hand," which shows that Gates actually tried to steer CIA analysis of Gorbachev in such a way as to create congressional pressure against working with the new Soviet leader:

Among the hardliners, Robert Gates, then the deputy CIA director for intelligence, felt that Gorbachev was a tough guy wearing a well-tailored suit. Underneath, he saw trouble, and did not want to be fooled. In the weeks before Gorbachev took power, in February 1985, Gates wrote a memo to one of the CIA's leading Soviet experts. "I don't much care for the way we are writing about Gorbachev," Gates said. "We are losing the thread of what toughness and skill brought him to where he is. This is not some Gary Hart or Lee Iacocca. We have to give the policy-makers a clearer view of the kind of person they may be facing." Gates said he felt that Gorbachev was the heir to Andropov, the former KGB chief, and to Suslov, the onetime orthodox ideology chief. Thus, Gates said, Gorbachev "could not be all sweetness and light. These had been two of the hardest cases in recent Soviet history. They would not a wimp under their wing."

The book recounts one episode after another of Gates arguing internally that Gorbachev was not a real reformer, that he was "cut from the old Soviet mold" and acting differently only to fool the U.S. From a series of 1986 CIA briefings that insisted Gorbachev would never challenge the Soviet system and was not entering arms negotiations with the intent of actually giving anything up:

Gates, a longtime Soviet specialist, who also briefed the president, predicted that Gorbachev wasn't going to be pushed around. "Gorbachev simply intended to outwit Reagan."

Even when Gorbachev proposed eliminating all nuclear weapons (something he and Reagan later came painfully close to achieving), Gates argued, wrongly, that it was a publicity stunt and "did not change any basic Soviet position." And on and on.

With commendable charity Fisher says, "The point here is not to beat up on Gates."

The point is that foreign policy is very, very difficult. Senior policymakers such as Biden and Gates are forced to make enormously tough choices based on data and precedent and rigorous analysis, yes, but also on gut and instinct, because outcomes are often impossible to predict. If Gates wants to filet Biden for being wrong, then that's his prerogative. But it's worth remembering that, when it comes to a standard as challenging as "every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades," everybody gets some big stuff wrong.

Me, I'm not at all above beating up on Gates. "CIA director" looks good on a résumé, just as it did on the résumé of another Résumé Guy, George Bush the Elder. It's always hard to know what a CIA director does, and my suspicion is that in the case of Chimpy Sr. it was "not much," or maybe "nothing that underlings in the Company couldn't clean up." I haven't read Gates's book, and don't intend to, but somehow I have a feeling I don't know any less about what he did in the job than people who have read the book (poor devils!).

Why hasn't he been in a lineup?

Left unspoken in all this is the one positive attribute that Gates brought to at least the early part of his tenure as secdef: He wasn't Donald Rumsfeld. Unfortunately, we know quite a lot about what Rummy did in the job, and it's horrifying. There are people who become legends such that it's said of their successors that there's no way they could succeed in the legend's shadow. In Rummy's case, it's the opposite: Only a drooling psychopath wouldn't have looked good after the whackjob he replaced. Gates had the incalculable advantage PR-wise of being the Unrummy.

Gates's foreign policy seems to be pretty much your standard tough-guy right-winger's view from inside a blindfold. I wouldn't be surprised, if some historian of foreign policy were to study his career, if a case couldn't be made that he was "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."


UPDATE: More on who knew what
about the fall of the "Evil Empire"

Reader Stentor added a comment that seems to me important enough to the story to append here. I couldn't get S's links to work, but I did find the one for the WaPo obit of Donald Graves and inserted it. Graves was famously profiled pseudonymously in July 1982 by the Washington Post's Charles Fenyvesi as "Mr. X" in "The Secret Files of Mr. X":

The State Department's man is a cartoonist's image of a federal bureaucrat: frail, bespectacled, with a preference for dark suits, white shirts and inconspicuous ties that never change width. He chooses his words with excruciating prudence, and the minute details of his speciality absorb him totally. He is horrified by the idea that he will be mentioned in the press, and he insists on anonymity. So we'll call him Mr. X.

Here's Stentor's comment:

Robert Gates wasn't the CIA's top Kremlinologist, he learned all he knew from this guy Donald E. Graves AKA "Mr. X" a State Department Analyst who edited the CIA's Survey of the Soviet Press for a decade before being transferred to State.

If Gates clashed with anyone back then besides Reagan, it was Graves, because he predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse that same year (1986) that Gates was waging his one-man campaign against Gorbachev. I quote a juicy fact from his Washington Post obituary that is quite damning to the legacy of Ronald Reagan's Evil-Empire-Ending Bona Fides.

"In 1986, his [Graves'] insights led him to predict that the Soviet Union would collapse internally in the near future. This analysis, which contradicted the Reagan administration's foreign policy positions, was not welcomed. Mr. Graves was removed as head of Soviet internal affairs, although he continued to work in the intelligence field. He later returned to the bureau under the first Bush administration.

But it sounds as if poor Mr. X, the bespectacled intellectual who was correct, got steamrolled by those in the Administration who disagreed with him. So if, in fact, Gates was dead-wrong back then, so was Reagan. That fact, printed right there in the WaPo, contradicts every rightwing Reagan-Lover's fantasy about the Gipper being responsible for toppling the Evil Empire, something I always knew was patently false, but never had any proof of until I read Graves' obituary shortly after he died. So you can bet I rub that in their faces as much as possible, like Cagney with a grapefruit.

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