Both Sides-- But Not The Joni Mitchell Version

The Wall Street Journal ran an OpEd by Robert Gates Friday evening, To End the Shutdown, Try Thinking Big on Immigration. It almost doesn't matter what his "big idea" is since his presentation is so utterly flawed. "Both parties are to blame for this embarrassing impasse," he wrote. Really? Both parties. Pin a pin in that. We'll come back to it. First I want to make sure you know who Robert Gates is. Since 2012 he's been a principal in the Silicon Valley-based neocon consulting firm RiceHadleyGates LLC, with Condoleeza Rice and Stephen Hadley. ("We offer advice based on extensive experience in the international arena. We work with companies to develop and implement their international strategic plans and help them expand in major emerging markets, including in Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas. The advice they offered Trump was to hire Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, which worked out badly for everyone concerned.) He also serves as chancellor at the college of William and Mary (his alma mater), on the board of Stabucks and as president of the Boy Scouts of America.

Before all that, Gates was a CIA intelligence analyst who worked his way up to director, despite his terrible reputation for corruption and his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. George W. Bush appointed him Secretary of Defense in 2006 and Obama made the foolish decision to keep him on.

His OpEd is a typical "both sides" concoction, part of a false national narrative. The government shut-down was not caused by "both" parties. It was caused by Trump as a way of forcing Congress to give him money for a useless vanity wall. Remember what Gates seems to have forgotten-- it was Trump who unilaterally ended DACA, took the Dreamers hostage, shut down the government, took 800,000 workers paychecks and the nation's safety hostage and is now magnanimously offering to give those back as part of a phony compromise if his blackmail is successful and the Democrats agree to fund his monument.

Congress should impeach him tomorrow instead. Gates' bullshit lies-- or maybe he's lost his mind-- is premised, in his own words, on the idea that "Few politicians in Washington-- Republican or Democrat, in Congress or the White House-- consider the best interest of the country a priority. The fight is all about politics, partisanship and power. To win the day, both sides are willing to upend the lives of 800,000 government employees and their families-- and countless others who depend on the spending of those families for their own livelihoods."

That's flat-out false. Did Gates miss this classic piece of film? Does this sound like "both sides" to you?



About a decade ago-- a little more-- I visited Myanmar. It was kind of surreal going to a fully functioning fascist state in the 21st Century. (There are more of them now, come to think of it.) In Yangon, the capital, the top tourist attraction, indisputably, is the Shwedagon Pagoda. That's me, in the picture below, walking around the complex back then. Notice one of my feet is bare. That was the result of a compromise I made with the ticket seller. He demanded I remove my shoes-- fine-- and my socks. I didn't want to take off my socks and wind up with some exotic foot disease. So I argued with him forever. We finally reached a "compromise." Both shoes, of course. But just one sock. When the Nazis put the Jews in concentration camps, were "both sides" wrong? Someone should ask Robert Gates sometime. 

What Comes To Mind When You Hear The Word "Unsuitable" These Days?

People are getting nervous that Trump can actually win. Blue America hasn't exactly been Hillary headquarters this election season, but yesterday we unveiled a new approach that goes beyond just #NeverTrump. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who worked with Hillary in the Obama cabinet, is no fan of hers either, not by any stretch of the imagination. But in a Wall Street Journal OpEd over the weekend, he made the same point we did: it's time to get serious about this sociopath getting into the White House.

When it comes to credibility problems, though, Donald Trump is in a league of his own. He has expressed support for building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico; for torturing suspected terrorists and killing their families; for Mr. Putin’s dictatorial leadership and for Saddam Hussein ’s nonexistent successes against terrorism. He also has said he is for using defense spending by NATO allies as the litmus test on whether the U.S. will keep its treaty commitments to them; for withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe, South Korea and Japan and for the latter two developing nuclear weapons-- a highly destabilizing prospect.

Mr. Trump has been cavalier about the use of nuclear weapons. He has a record of insults to servicemen, their families and the military, which he called a “disaster.” He has declared our senior military leaders “reduced to rubble” and “embarrassing our country” and has suggested that, if elected, he will purge them-- an unprecedented and unconscionable threat. As of late, he appears to be rethinking some of these positions but he has yet to learn that when a president shoots off his mouth, there are no do-overs.

Mr. Trump is also willfully ignorant about the rest of the world, about our military and its capabilities, and about government itself. He disdains expertise and experience while touting his own-- such as his claim that he knows more about ISIS than America’s generals. He has no clue about the difference between negotiating a business deal and negotiating with sovereign nations.

All of the presidents I served were strong personalities with strongly held views about the world. But each surrounded himself with independent-minded, knowledgeable and experienced advisers who would tell the president what he needed to hear, not what he wanted to hear. Sometimes presidents would take their advice, sometimes not. But they always listened.

The world we confront is too perilous and too complex to have as president a man who believes he, and he alone, has all the answers and has no need to listen to anyone. In domestic affairs, there are many checks on what a president can do; in national security there are few constraints. A thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America.

I understand the broad anger and frustration against political leaders in both parties. I have written about my disgust as secretary of defense as I watched politicians repeatedly place re-election above the nation’s best interests. Polls make clear that most Americans are dissatisfied with the two major party candidates for president. But as I used to say in the Pentagon, we are where we are-- not where we might wish to be. We have to make a decision. Perhaps the debates, if the candidates focus on substance rather than personal attacks, will clarify the choice.

...At least on national security, I believe Mr. Trump is beyond repair. He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.

12 hours apart, it looks like Gates got under his thin skin

If Trump didn't dig Gates' analysis, he's not going to be celebrating the Times follow-up by Jonathan Martin. In his buffoonish style, he's been threatening to sue the Times and if anything will push him over the edge, this would. Martin's opening probably would phase Trump in the slightest. "[T]his past week," Martin asserted, "offered a vivid illustration of how little regard Mr. Trump has for the long-held expectations of America’s leaders. He is not only breaking the country’s political norms, he and his campaign aides are now all but mocking them." After all, that is exactly what has made Trump so popular with so many of the followers now driving around with "I'm deplorable and I vote" bumperstickers on their Hondas, Toyotas, Nissans and pickup trucks.

Routine falsehoods, unfounded claims and inflammatory language have long been staples of Mr. Trump’s anything-goes campaign. But as the polls tighten and November nears, his behavior, and the implications for the country should he become president, are alarming veteran political observers-- and leaving them deeply worried about the precedent being set, regardless of who wins the White House.

“It’s frightening,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota. “Our politics, because of him, is descending to the level of a third-world country. There’s just nothing beneath him. And I don’t know why we would think he would change if he became president. That’s what’s really scary.”

Stephen Hess, who served in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, could not even contemplate the prospect of Mr. Trump as commander in chief.

“It’s incredibly depressing,” Mr. Hess said of Mr. Trump. “He’s the most profoundly ignorant man I’ve ever seen at this level in terms of understanding the American presidency, and, even more troubling, he makes no effort to learn anything.”

Mr. Trump’s advocates insist that the critics are missing the larger impact of his candidacy, and how his campaign and presidency could be a force for good. As a New York Times-CBS poll released last week indicated, voters see him as more likely to aggressively confront what they see as a rotten political system, even if they recognize Mr. Trump as a risky choice.

“On the things that are really big, he will in some clumsy way force real change,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who is an adviser to Mr. Trump. “Washington won’t be the same when he’s done.” But that is what is so worrisome to many observers of Mr. Trump’s rise. His critics fear that his norm-breaking campaign portends a political future in which candidates pay no penalty for unabashedly telling untruths, disregarding the public’s right to know, and lobbing racially charged accusations.

“I worry that if those of us in politics and the media don’t do a lot of soul-searching after this election, a slightly smarter Trump will succeed in the future,” said Jon Favreau, Mr. Obama’s former chief speechwriter. “For some politicians and consultants, the takeaway from this election will be that they can get away with almost anything.”

As Martin Nolan, a former editor and reporter at the Boston Globe who has chronicled politics for over 50 years, put it: “Truth has a low priority in the misnomer known as reality TV.”

“Rules,” Mr. Nolan added, “are for losers.”

The only salvation this year, argue Mr. Trump’s detractors, is that he is a singular figure in American life, and his would-be successors will not be able to skirt accountability in the fashion of the celebrity provocateur.

...“Trump is reflecting a culture that is more crass, more accepting of vulgarity and more attuned to pop culture,” said Matt Lewis, a conservative writer. “The bar has been lowered where going on Dr. Oz is perfectly acceptable and maybe even cutting edge.”

Normally, we'd just say something like whoever gets elected president, we're going to desperately need a stronger and more progressive Congress to stand up to him or her. And that would be true-- that is true... and you contribute the the Blue America candidates to the House and Senate on this page. Right now, though, we are looking at the prospect of a Trump presidency and... shuddering. Highly recommended:

What Would A Trumpist Foreign Policy Be Like? No One Really Knows... But There Are Some Unfortunate Clues

Trump keeps going on TV and claiming that foreign policy experts have given his maiden foreign policy speech high grades. As with most of what Trump says, that isn't true. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Trump is a guy who doesn't understand the difference between a business negotiation and a negotiation with sovereign powers (watch the video of him up top on ABC's This Week yesterday. "One of the things that worries me," said Gates, "is that he doesn't appear to listen to people. He believes he has all the answers. That he's the smartest man in the room. I've worked with different presidents. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. One thing they all had in common was a willingness to listen to people who had experience and then make their own independent judgments... I think [foreign leaders have] spoken for themselves. Many have said publicly, how worried they are about the possibility of Mr. Trump becoming president. His unpredictability. His lack of understanding of the complexity of international affairs. His threats. His claims that he's going to make other countries do things when, in fact, the president of the United States does not have the power to make them do things. So, I think-- I think a lot of leaders around the world, both among our friends and potential adversaries, are quite concerned."

Conservative pundits pointed out that the speech was "incoherent and shallow" and "filled with internal contradictions, falsehoods and genuinely crazy assertions." But Ryan Lizza noted that the speech "was hardly a break with current conservative thinking about foreign policy. Anyone who has listened to conservative talk radio or read prominent conservative columnists, such as Charles Krauthammer, condemn President Obama’s foreign policy as weak and feckless would recognize Trump’s speech as a standard list of grievances and proposals on the right. On foreign policy, just as he has done on immigration and crime and race, Trump has been paying attention to the base of the Republican Party. He has simply distilled the base’s grievances into something like a platform." Nonetheless, Krauthammer found it a jumble that offered no clarity.

Fareed Zakaria demolished the speech and called it an embarrasment-- populist pandering masquerading as a strategy... "anti-immigrant and nativist... largely isolationist but if and when engaged abroad militaristic and unilateral. In trade it is protectionist and on all matters deeply suspicious of international alliances and global conventions."

Writing for the Brookings Institute, Thomas Wright found the speech "contradictory in parts and repeated standard Republican criticisms of President Obama, but there was a clear message that is consistent with what Trump has said before. It was not the shift in substance that some predicted. There were several notable takeaways, most of which confirmed what we already knew.

1. Trump will end U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia

2. Trump has an isolationist mindset

3. Trump wants to do a deal with Russia and China

4. Trump’s audience was the Republican political establishment, not its foreign policy elite

5. Trump views foreign policy very personally

"Nothing in this speech will ease widespread international concern at Trump’s foreign policy," he concluded. "If anything, concerns will grow as Trump demonstrates an ability to present an isolationist 'America First' vision as a more mainstream realist foreign policy. We are headed for an election on fundamental questions of America’s role in the world."

Much of what he said, he just pulled out of his ass-- or off the Hate Talk Radio airwaves. USAToday fact-checked his assertions and found many of them just plain false.

In his foreign policy speech, Donald Trump claimed that “now ISIS is making millions and millions of dollars a week selling Libya oil.” But an expert on Libya’s oil operations told us there’s no evidence that the Islamic State is producing or selling oil out of that country.

Trump also repeated false and misleading claims that we have vetted before on the NAFTA pact, Iraq War and the U.S. trade deficit:

• Trump said NAFTA “literally emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs.” Actually, economic studies say NAFTA’s impact on U.S. jobs has been small.

• Trump claimed he was “totally against” the Iraq War and warned “that it would destabilize the Middle East.” There is no public record of him being against the war before it started.

• Trump said President Obama “crippled us” with “a huge trade deficit.” Actually, the trade deficit has gone down under Obama.

Trump also criticized Hillary Clinton’s response to the Benghazi attacks on Sept. 11, 2012. We address one of the Benghazi claims below, and in a separate article-- “Trump on Clinton’s ‘3 a.m. Call’”-- we write about Trump’s claim that Clinton failed to take charge during the Benghazi attacks, and instead “decided to go home and sleep.” The evidence shows Clinton was actively involved in responding to the attacks, and subsequent investigations concluded the government response was appropriate.

Hisham Melhem, one of the most respected Middle Eastern journalists based in America is the Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya and yesterday warned his readers what they should expect were Trump to get into the White House, accurately dubbing the speech "a toxic brew of distrust, ignorance and isolationism" and pointing out that "the America that Trump wants to revive is a power that is unto itself, unwilling to be magnanimous, or benevolent, while at the same time serves and protects its interests as a sovereign nation."

It was a strange sight to be marveled at and remembered in amazement. Donald Trump addressing the foreign policy establishment in Washington, reading from a prepared but meandering speech, obviously written by a committee of advisors. The man who mocked President Obama for delivering his speeches by reading them with the help of a teleprompter, stood behind a teleprompter, and was ill at ease reading for 40 minutes without wildly gesticulating, or making exaggerated poses, and refraining from hurling insults at large groups of people.

The man who personifies anti-intellectualism was talking to the scholars, journalists, and pundits he usually revels in denigrating them. This was part of a long held tradition in presidential campaigns; every candidate has to deliver a ‘major’ foreign policy address to establish his knowledge of world affairs and his understanding of the complex national security challenges he is likely to face as a president. But the presidential veneer did not hide the real Donald Trump who gave us an incoherent collage of inconsistencies, superficial slogans, dangerous and simplistic solutions to complex issues, misstatements, and downright falsehoods.

The speech betrayed a shocking ignorance of the intricacies of the international system that the U.S created after WWII and the new European dynamics that emerged after the end of the Cold War. In Trump’s world, globalization is seen only as a negative force, and not as the engine of growth that the US ushered in, and mega deals can be struck with Russia and China regardless of their belligerent behavior, and alliances should be based solely on transactional and not value-based considerations, and autocratic regimes can be tolerated if they are good business partners, regardless of what they do to their citizens. He naively believes that the US has already surrendered to the ‘false song of globalism’, as if globalization could have been conceived without America at its core.

Trump chastised America’s allies supposedly because they are not paying enough for American protection, while he showed deference to America’s adversaries. Trump probably did not know that the major theme of his speech ‘America First’ is a slogan with an ominous history. In the 1930’s and early 1940’s, ‘America First’ was the name of an isolationist movement that did not want to help England and the other European countries fighting Nazism and Fascism.

Pity these strange American times, when the presumptive nominee of a major political party after delivering such a hollow speech, is given a cover of legitimacy by the likes of Republican senator Bob Corker, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who described the speech as ‘very thoughtful’ and praised the candidate for 'challenging the foreign policy establishment.’ Jacob Heilbrunn the editor of the National Interest Magazine which hosted Trump extolled the candidate because he ‘was quite disciplined’ and ‘more retrained’.

Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned pan-Arab version of CNN based in Dubai but broadcasting to millions of people across the Arab world, it's top markets being Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Israel, Bahrain and Qatar.

Has "Sling-Bob" Gates ALWAYS gotten it wrong?

A quick show of hands: How many of you out there would let "Dr. Gates" so much as look at, let alone touch, your tonsils?

"This combination of elfish charm and sub-par performance goes back a long way."

-- Jonathan Alter, in "The Wars Robert
Gates Got Wrong," on newyorker.com

by Ken

As we prepare to talk again about Robert "Sling-Bob" Gates, the former director of Central Intelligence and (under both R and D prezzes) secretary of defense, we should perhaps do a quick-refresher quiz on the circumstances under which Sling-Bob made his return to gummint service in 2006, as successor to term-and-a-half Bush-regime Defense Secretary Donald "O Yeah? You and Who Else Is Gonna Indict Me?" Rumsfeld.

A DWT QUIZ: BACK WHEN SLING-BOB
REPLACED OLD RUMMY AS SECDEF . . .

Let's say that, hypothetically, you have just been named to a job that was until recently infested by Donald "O Yeah? You and Who Else Is Gonna Indict Me?" Rumsfeld. Perhaps a job more or less like secretary of defense. The general response to your appointment, even if nothing more is known about you, is most likely to be:

(a) "We're sure going to miss Old Rummy."

(b) "Sure, Old Rummy was a pain in the butt, but we have to hope the new guy keeps all those splendid reforms he made at the Pentagon."

(c) "Look, Rummy's a close personal friend, but as long as the new guy isn't a known crackhead, he's a step up. I wouldn't put Old Rummy in charge of a school bake sale."

(d) "Ding-dong, Old Rummy's gone!"

ANSWER: Wouldn't you like to know?

A couple of weeks into the hubbub over the advance publicity about the terible things that Sling-Bob says in his new book about President Obama and Vice President Biden (and at least in the advance publicity no one else, though apparently there are other folks who have bad things said about them in the actual book), I raised the question: "Why on earth would anyone pay any attention to Village hack Bob Gates? (Just 'cause he wrote some crummy book?)" And I suggested that a lot of the "respect" accorded Sling-Bob's performance as defense secretary had to do with his being the "Unrummy."

Among other pungent things the highly respected Sling-Bob says, you'll surely recall, is that Vice President Biden has been "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades wrong about every foreign-policy issue of the last 40 years."To which I would have thought the obvious response would be: "Boy, that butt-covering Sling-Bob sure is full of shit!"

That's even without factoring in the important reminder I cited from people who are more au courant than myself with the ins and outs of Sling-Bob's career. This would be his utter and complete fucking up of the most important question he ever faced in his many long decades of earnest public résumé-building: his savagely scornful dismissal of that Mikhail Gorbachev character as anything new or different in the way of Kremlin leadership. Sling-Bob's sliming emphatically enclosed those nutjob analysts who were saying that -- get this! -- the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse! (Now stop your laughing, boys and girls. Who could have known?)

In approaching Jonathan Alter's reporting, I always try to keep in mind how well plugged in JA is to the hearts and minds of Village people (who are not to be confused with the Village People, who at least provided a modicum of entertainment). So when Jonathan tells us that Sling-Bob is beloved of Village people of both the R and D (but especially the R) varieties, that he "was not a kiss-ass but one of the shrewdest public servants of his generation," well, it's a highly Village-compatible rendering.

To which we need to quickly add a reminder that popularity among Village people rarely has much to do with competence. For our Jonathan, it "helps to explain why [Sling-Bob's] many failures and missed calls have been all but air-brushed out of accounts of his career." Jonathan goes so far as to suggest that the famous "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades" judgment, "as it happens . . . applies rather precisely to Gates himself."

"On first impression," says Jonathan, "Gates is unprepossessing: someone who worked closely with him compared his appearance to 'the guy at P. C. Richards who sold microwave ovens.' "

But upon his return to government in 2006, after a thirteen-year absence, colleagues and even people who had never met him began to think of him as oracular. His nickname in the Obama Administration was "Yoda." Cabinet colleagues, especially Hillary Clinton, who sought peace between State and Defense, listened to him with the ear-cupped deference of actors in the old ad for E. F. Hutton. And yet Gates's experience and wisdom failed to prevent the biggest breach between the President and the military since the Korean War. On Afghanistan, the most internally contentious national-security issue of his tenure, he failed to perform one of the most important parts of his job.

This combination of elfish charm and sub-par performance goes back a long way. Gates was tarnished by the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-nineteen eighties, arguably the worst scandal since Watergate. At the time, he was deputy director of the C.I.A. under William Casey and admitted, in an earlier book, "From the Shadows," that, having been "dealt a lousy hand by the president and Congress, the Agency played it amazingly stupidly." That's putting it mildly. It was under Casey and Gates that the politicizing of intelligence that would prove so ruinous two decades later, in the Iraq War, began. The special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, didn't prosecute Gates but, due to his deep involvement in the fiasco (including his faulty memory of when he learned of the arms-for-hostages deal), the Senate forced Gates to withdraw his nomination for C.I.A. director in 1987. "Did I do enough? Could I have done more?" he asks in "From the Shadows." He answers yes: "I gave myself a C-."

Such winning self-effacement has consistently helped endear Gates to Presidents; four years later, President George H. W. Bush, a good friend, renominated him. Gates got the big job at the C.I.A., but his judgment on the big issues didn't improve. He had received his Ph.D. for studying the Soviet Union, but he managed to miss the signs of its impending demise, calling Mikhail Gorbachev a "phony" and discounting his reforms as meaningless. Whether this was because Gates, a self-described hawk, was too dug into his Cold War views or because he listened too uncritically to misguided C.I.A. analysts -- or some combination -- remains unclear.

The third monumental foreign-policy issue of the last thirty years was the Iraq War. Gates was out of government, in 2003, when George W. Bush decided to go to war, but he acknowledges that he fully supported it. Biden supported the war, too, though at least Biden later admitted that he had been wrong. The conventional wisdom is that Gates, by now back in government, was right to support the 2006 surge in Iraq (and Biden wrong to oppose it), though many analysts now argue about whether it was really the increase in U.S. troops that brought down the level of violence.

President Obama made many of the right decisions -- moving more quickly than some commanders like to end the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy on gays in the military; trimming the defense budget; and raiding Osama bin Laden's compound -- over the objections of his Defense Secretary. On Afghanistan, Obama accepted large parts of Gates's compromise; a surge of thirty thousand troops split the difference between Biden's "counter-terrorism" plan (which featured drones strikes, special forces, and many fewer troops than the Pentagon wanted) and the "counter-insurgency" strategy, which called for forty thousand more troops and many years of nation building, and was favored by General Stanley McChrystal, most other top commanders, and Hillary Clinton. In "Duty," Gates explains at length how he served as broker amid an extremely complex set of policy choices. Right call? Maybe. But in a chapter entitled "A House Divided" he details bitter and personal divisions between the military and the White House over Afghanistan that can hardly be construed as success for a man who was in a position to prevent, or at least ease, them.

Before Obama made his decision about the surge, the Pentagon tried to box him in. McChrystal, the field commander, issued a report, which Gates reveals was leaked to Bob Woodward by McChrystal's staff, saying a ten-year counterinsurgency commitment, costing nearly one trillion dollars, was the only way to go. The general then turned insubordinate after a speech in London, telling the audience that he couldn't support the policy if the President decided in favor of a counter-terrorism plan to use drones and special forces instead of a large contingent of troops of the sort favored by Joe Biden. (McChrystal apologized for that comment and was fired the following year after he and his staff trashed Biden and others to Michael Hastings, a writer for Rolling Stone). The London comments came not long after General David Petraeus, then the head of all military operations in the region, told a conservative columnist that "it won't work if we don't" send a lot more forces. As if that weren't enough, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before Congress that many more troops were needed in Afghanistan.

Gates issued a public statement advising military commanders to give their advice to the President in private, not in public, but Obama was not mollified. The Commander-in-Chief was "livid," Gates writes. "Is it lack of respect for me?" Obama asked. Was it because he was young and hadn't served in the military? I learned, when I was researching my book, "The Promise: President Obama, Year One," that Obama dressed down the brass more sharply than any President had since Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur. The President was so angry that when I interviewed him on-the-record later that fall and asked if he felt publicly "jammed" by the Pentagon before he made his Afghanistan decision, he replied, "I neither confirm nor deny that I've gotten jammed" -- an extraordinary comment for an American President to make about his own administration. Gates writes that he was "seething inside" when Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, complained about the jamming. "I said that if there had been a strategy to do that, they [the brass] sure as hell wouldn't have been so obvious," Gates writes.

This is Gates propping up a straw man. Just because it wasn't a "Seven Days in May" scenario, with officers plotting a military coup, doesn't mean that the military wasn't trying to manipulate the President. They were upset that Obama didn't automatically accept their recommendations, as Bush had. "The Pentagon was used to getting what it wanted," Obama told me at the time. When it didn't, bad feelings arose. "A wall was going up between the military and the president," Gates writes.

In assessing his own mistakes in Afghanistan, Gates notes that his biggest was failing to ride herd over the Marines who, for inter-service turf reasons, initially deployed en masse to the Helmand Province, where many died, instead of to more populous regions, where their efforts would have been better aligned with the overall mission. Reports about Gates's book, though, have made it seem as if Obama's expression of ambivalence about his Afghanistan decision was somehow a strike against him. In truth, any thoughtful President should have reservations and second thoughts about many decisions, especially one at odds with his campaign promise to emphasize nation building at home.

Gates has some complimentary things to say about the President (especially regarding his analytical rigor and his treatment of veterans), but he admits that his anger sometimes clouded his judgment. When Obama, at Biden's suggestion, cast his decision on beginning a withdrawal from Afghanistan, in July of 2011, as a direct order (so that the military couldn't drag its feet), Gates felt insulted. He considered the order unnecessary, unprecedented, and a reflection of how much the White House misunderstood military culture. Only when it came time to write the book did he gain perspective. "My anger and frustration with the White House staff during the process led me to become more protective of the military and a stronger advocate for its position than I should have been," Gates writes. "All of us at the senior-most level did not serve the president well in this process. Our ‘team of rivals' let personal feelings and distrust cloud our perceptions and recommendations."

Gates reports no serious disagreements between the Pentagon and the White House on China, Russia, North Korea, the Middle East, terrorism, or Iran. We won't know for years if the lack of discord on those other national-security issues will improve the batting average of a Secretary of Defense who has set himself up nicely to be overrated by history. We do know that Gates's position on Afghanistan -- the one eventually adopted by the President -- ended up being, in his own words, "pretty close" to Joe Biden's.

#

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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JFK Was Right: The CIA Should Have Been Splintered Into A Thousand Pieces And Scattered To The Winds

After Kennedy took office, he was unaware that the CIA, in accord with an OK from President Eisenhower and working with the Belgians, had overseen the gruesome torture and brutal murder of the Congo's popular first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. With Lumumba already dead a month and his body dissolved in sulphuric acid, Kennedy called for him to be reintegrated into the new nation's government. The CIA-- Allen Dulles, who JFK foolishly kept on as director-- hadn't told him that they had carried out Eisenhower 's orders to have him murdered as a commie dupe. According to Stephen Kinzer's book about Allen and John Foster Dulles, The Brothers, "Less than two years later, Allen casually admitted that he might have exaggerated the danger Lumumba posed to the West. A television interviewer, Eric Severeid, asked him if he had come to believe that any of his covert operations were unnecessary. He named just one. 'I think that we overrated the danger in, let's say, the Congo,' Allen said. 'It looked as though they were going to make a serious attempt at takeover in the Belgian Congo. Well, it didn't work out that way at all. Now maybe they intended to do it, but they didn't find the situation ripe and they beat a pretty hasty retreat.'" There was worse to come.

Eisenhower had also authorized the assassination of Fidel Castro. When that didn't work out, he authorized a half-assed invasion of Cuban that came to fruition right after Kennedy became president, the Bay of Pigs. As the clownish plot fell apart in the first minutes of the "invasion," the CIA and some elements of the military tried to get Kennedy to U.S. commit Air Force, Naval and Army resources. He thought they were all out of their minds and realized he had made a terrible mistake by keeping Dulles-- who was completely senile by then-- in office. Again, from The Brothers:

At White House meetings the next day, Kennedy fended off more pleas that he send U.S. forces to support the Bay of Pigs invaders. The strongest came from his chief of naval operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, who came into the Oval Office late in the evening with an equally agited [CIA official Richard] Bissell.

"Let me take two jets and shoot down this enemy aircraft," Burke pleaded.

"No," Kennedy replied. "I don't want to get the United States involved with this."

"Can I not send in an airstrike?"

"No."

"Can we send in a few planes?"

"No, because they could be identified as United States."

"Can we paint out their numbers?"

"No."

Grasping for options, Burke asked if Kennedy would authorize artillery attacks on Cuban forces from American destroyers. The answer was the same: "No."

Later that day Kennedy told an aide, "I probably made a mistake keeping Allen Dulles."

…More than one hundred of the invaders had died. Most of the rest were rounded up and imprisoned. For Castro it was a supreme, ecstatic triumph. Kennedy was staggered.

"How can I have been so stupid?" he wondered aloud.

Others were equally stunned. Criticism of the CIA, in both the press and Congress, rose to unprecedented intensity. Allen was not spared. The cover story in Time, headlined "The Cuba Disaster," questioned his very concept of intelligence.

…If Allen had not yet confronted the implications of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy had. In private he cursed "CIA bastards" for luring him into it, and wished he could "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

He should have. America would have been much better off. But all he did was fire Dulles, too late to prevent the horrors the Dulles brothers committed in our names in Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, not to mention the Congo and Cuba. Yesterday another CIA chief-- and another failed Republican scumbag who was foolishly held over by a Democratic president-- released his memoir.

President Obama eventually lost faith in the troop increase he ordered in Afghanistan, his doubts fed by top White House civilian advisers opposed to the strategy, who continually brought him negative news reports suggesting it was failing, according to his former defense secretary, Robert M. Gates.

In a new memoir, Mr. Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration who served for two years under Mr. Obama, praises the president as a rigorous thinker who frequently made decisions “opposed by his political advisers or that would be unpopular with his fellow Democrats.” But Mr. Gates says that by 2011, Mr. Obama began expressing his own criticism of the way his strategy in Afghanistan was playing out.

At a pivotal meeting in the situation room in March 2011, Mr. Gates said, Mr. Obama opened with a blast of frustration over his Afghan policy-- expressing doubts about Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander he had chosen, and questioning whether he could do business with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Mr. Gates writes. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War is the first book describing those years written from inside the cabinet. Mr. Gates offers more than 600 pages of detailed history of his personal wars with Congress, the Pentagon bureaucracy and, in particular, Mr. Obama’s White House staff over the four and a half years he sought to salvage victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “controlling nature” of the Obama White House and the national security staff “took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level,” Mr. Gates writes.

Digby's look at the release, Once a Bush loyalist always a Bush loyalist, makes more sense that Gates' self-serving critique and helps make the point that it is incumbent on a president to be highly skeptical on the CIA and the Military Industrial Complex-- unlike Eisenhower until his farewell address, the high-point of his 8 presidential years. Especially interesting is Digby's update from Max Fisher in the Washington Post:

... if Gates is going to take shots at Biden on this scale, it's worth asking how Gates would fare under similar scrutiny. 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.

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.

Historically, the United States would have been better off to use CIA Directors as negative indicators of action. They are always wrong, always wrong about everything. From day one, they missed everything important and disastrously misinterpreted everything they touched. The U.S. and the whole world would have been a lot better off had Kennedy-- or Truman, who had similar ideas-- splintered them into a thousand pieces and scattered them into the winds.

Did Kerry And His Clique Plot An End Run Around Obama On Syria?

Susan Rice is as much a hawk and a creature of the Military-Industrial Complex as John Kerry ever was. But McCain and Lindsey Graham, America's two most preeminent warmongers, sandbagged and sabotaged Rice and demanded that Obama appoint Kerry Secretary of State. Policy-wise there is no difference between Rice and Kerry and today she serves as National Security Advisor and he serves, thanks to McCain and Graham, as Secretary of State. The difference is that her loyalty is unquestionably to Obama. Kerry doesn't give a crap about Obama.

In fact, impeccable Beltway sources have told me that Kerry sees himself as the "President of Foreign Policy." He tried-- and failed-- to pull off a virtual coup in Washington over the Syria crisis. A very dominant, transpartisan and self-serving National Security clique in Washington was determined to railroad Obama, who's concerns are more about domestic affairs than foreign affairs to begin with, into a war with Syria and-- in their fondest dreams-- Iran. John Stewart looked at it with a sense of humor the other night on The Daily Show, outing Lindsey Graham for the whole nation.



Gene Lyons made many of the same points-- without pointing out Lindsey Graham's bizarre sexual dysfunctions-- at the National Memo yesterday. He starts with a quote from a Graham hero, Winston Churchill: "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war."

Before you make the mistake of taking President Obama’s most strident critics regarding the Syrian deal too seriously, ponder this: With few exceptions, those calling the Russian-American agreement to eliminate Bashar al-Assad’s nerve gas arsenal a capitulation, a sellout, and a shameful retreat also think bombing Damascus wouldn’t have been nearly enough.

Nothing short of a boots-on American invasion of Syria would have satisfied these jokers. Prominent among them is Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who views the diplomatic breakthrough as “an act of provocative weakness on America’s part.”

McCain, who has vigorously supported all nine of the nation’s last three wars on about 316 TV talk shows, is never happy unless the U.S. is attacking somebody. Only violent solutions strike him as realistic. That’s probably the single biggest reason he never became president.

Then there’s Eliot A. Cohen, founding father of the Project for a New American Century, a now-defunct Washington pressure group whose messianic schemes for a U.S. empire stretching from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan inspired the Iraq War. Featuring such luminaries as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, to these geniuses, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was only the beginning. Next on their agenda was Iran, in case you wonder why the mad ayatollahs have been tinkering with nukes.

So anyway, just as President Obama was getting ready to ask Congress to endorse a punitive strike against Syrian chemical weapon sites, Cohen published a Washington Post column scolding Americans for their cowardice. The families of the war dead, he allowed, were entitled to their sorrow.

“But for the great mass of the American public,” he wrote “for their leaders and the elites who shape public opinion, ‘war-weariness’ is unearned cant, unworthy of a serious nation and dangerous in a violent world…Americans can change the channel if they find the images too disturbing.”

Got that citizens? Shut up, pay your taxes and avert your eyes.

Next the Obama administration pulled a large Russian rabbit out of its hat, leaving the neocons feeling foolish. For all the hugger-mugger about “red lines” and the White House’s odd decision to position a naval task force within striking range of Damascus before deciding to ask congressional permission, the end result was nevertheless remarkable.

Clumsy? Definitely. But it’s not a Bruce Willis movie; it’s a foreign policy.

“By hook or by crook,” Kevin Drum writes “Obama (a) raised the issue of Assad’s chemical weapons to an international level, (b) got Vladimir Putin (!) to take a lead role in reining them in, (c) got Assad to join the chemical weapons ban and agree to give up his stockpiles, and (d) [did] it all while keeping military pressure as an active option, but without ever firing a shot.”

In other words, for all the nonsensical talk of “appeasement,” the very crafty President Putin and the Syrian dictator now own this deal. Meanwhile, U.S. military options remain unchanged. President Obama has bought himself considerable freedom of action.

Mike Tomasky has it right: “If Assad is mad enough to use [chemical weapons] again, Obama won’t mess with Congress or even Russia. He’ll be credited by most observers…for having shown restraint the first time, and more people will agree at that point that Assad must be punished.”

Then there’s Charles Krauthammer, the Post columnist who accuses Obama of “epic incompetence,” complaining that the Russians prefer to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. He worries that “Assad is the key link in the anti-Western Shiite crescent stretching from Tehran through Damascus and Beirut to the Mediterranean.”

Hmm… Isn’t something missing here? Let’s go to the maps. It’s roughly 900 miles from Tehran to Damascus via, oh yeah… Baghdad. See, it’s precisely the U.S. invasion of Iraq championed by Krauthammer and his chums that created this supposedly scary alliance. Sectarian strife among Sunni and Shiite Muslims has erupted there at irregular intervals for almost 1,400 years. Shouldn’t these brilliant thinkers have thought of that before now?

So what do the Russians want? In a word, stability. Unlike the U.S., Russia has a large Muslim minority. Roughly 1 in 6 Russians is Muslim. Like the Tsarnaev bothers of Boston, MA, nearly all are Sunni. What Putin definitely doesn’t want is Chechen separatists getting their hands on nerve gas. Driving overland, Syria’s roughly as close to Chechnya as to Iran.

Can Putin be trusted? To do what’s good for Russia, yes. As President Obama explained to George Stephanopoulos, the Cold War is over. “I don’t think that Mr. Putin has the same values that we do,” he said. “But what I’ve also said to him directly is that we both have an interest in preventing chaos, we both have an interest in preventing terrorism. The situation in Syria right now is untenable.”

And he also quoted Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

And when I mentioned a "transpartisan and self-serving National Security clique," it wasn't by chance. The War Party isn't just McCain, Eliot Cohen, Lindsey and Krauthammer. Many of us watched with dismay as Bronx New Dem Eliot Engel, the congressional spokesperson for AIPAC and Israel's Likud Party, cheer-led for war for the last month. House Dems have him slated to become Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee if they ever take back control of Congress. And then there's Obama's last Defense Secretary, Republican-turned-Democrat ex-congressman and neo-liberal shithead Leon Panetta. Like most of the War Party, he was furious that Obama went to Congress. Panetta sounds like McCain is writing his lines for him: "When the president of the United States draws a red line, the credibility of this country is dependent on him backing up his word."

Panetta's a clown and Obama's first Defense Secretary, Republican Robert Gates, was happy to point out why.

Gates said a strike would be like "throwing gasoline on an extremely complex fire in the Middle East." He brought up past interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as examples of how American military action can lead to unintended consequences.

He also dismissed attacking Syria to enforce a red line.

"I believe to blow a bunch of stuff up over a couple of days to underscore or validate a point or principle is not a strategy," he said.

...Gates, who was appointed secretary of defense by former President George W. Bush and retained by Obama, said he thought America's most recent presidents "have become too quick to reach for a gun to solve an international problem."

Two items from the daily hatred and fear blotter

Know your church: Priests at Our Lady of the Rosary Church in San Diego have saved the Catholic Church from the abomination of allowing mass to be said for a dead homo. (The online world being what it is, I guess I better quickly add that the foregoing is written in total mocking derision of the Church's inhumane bigotry and hatred.)

by Ken

I know we've had our fair share of LGBT- or just-plain-gay-themed stories lately, and clearly these are of heightened interest to Howie and me, but I like to think they're of interest to anyone concerned with basic rights. More particularly, it seems to me that the attempt on the Right to hold the line or even push back on these fronts should be of serious concern to all lovers of freedom. I can think of two reasons:

(1) Wouldn't it be fair to say that when repression is in the air, it's targeted first at the most vulnerable groups? It would be wise not to imagine that the Unholy Warriors of the Right will only be going after the LGBT contingent. This is an "orthodoxy issue," and the Upholders of the Right have their sights set on all deviants from the One True Path.

Call this the Canary in the Mine Factor.

(2) Because hatred of all things LGBT is perhaps the most emotional of all the organized-religious hatreds, the current jihad is being waged with a backs-against-the-wall ferocity, with a sense of the Forces of Darkness closing in on the Righteous. What I'm suggesting is that we're seeing with better than usual clarity the special viciousness and dehumanization that lies at the core of the Defense of Orthodoxy when the defenders feel they're under siege.

It may seem paradoxical, but the very same ferocity can be triggered when the Defenders score victories, as they have, for example, in all the public referenda on same-sex marriage laws. It may not seem reasonable that they react almost identically in victory and defeat, but I think the common thread is raw hatred and fear, which when you get down to it seems really what the most fire-breathingly orthodox of orthodox religionists are all about.

Call this the Hatred and Fear Factor.

FROM TODAY'S HATRED AND FEAR BLOTTER --

I. DADT isn't going quietly

We know now that Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) is not going to be consigned to the dustbin of lousy public policy during the Pentagon stewardship of Robert Gates on Thursday. Opinion is divided as to whether the advent of Leon Panetta as defense secretary is going to provide, intentionally or otherwise, an excuse for further delay in the secretary's certification of military readiness for repeal. Most obviously, a new secretary taking the reins of a department as vast and complex as the DoD, especially with approximately two and a half wars in progress, is going to have his hands full and could easily justify setting other priorities. Beyond that, if the new secretary feels that on this particular matter he must do his own due diligence, well . . .

Further delay would be regrettable from a theoretical standpoint, of course. DADT is not only demeaning to the people it targets, it also undermines our national security by depriving the military of the services (and special skills) of a lot of people who want nothing more than to serve honorably. But further delay continues to take a serious toll on servicemen and servicewomen. Remember, the Obama Pentagon has never stopped enforcing DADT.

Consider this report from Advocate.com:

Pentagon Confirms New DADT Discharges

By Andrew Harmon
Posted on Advocate.com June 27, 2011 03:30:00 PM ET

The Pentagon confirmed Monday that more service members have been discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” pending certification of the policy’s repeal, with one individual’s discharge approved as recently as Thursday.

A total of four airmen have been discharged under the policy in the last several weeks, Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez confirmed Monday.

One of those individuals is Airman First Class Albert Pisani, who spoke to The Advocate earlier this month of his voluntary separation under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which defense officials approved on April 29.

Air Force spokesman Maj. Joel Harper told The Advocate that the discharges of three additional service members — two female staff sergeants and one male second lieutenant— have been approved since an April 29 discharge. Harper declined to say whether Pisani was the April 29 discharge, citing confidentiality reasons.

When The Advocate story ran, Defense officials had said that the separation approved April 29 was the only such discharge under DADT since late October, when the Defense Department limited authority for discharges to just five senior officials.

But in a statement, Harper confirmed the additional discharges since. “On May 31st, 2011, the Secretary of the Air Force approved discharges of two Airmen under the provisions of 10 USC 654 [the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy],“ Harper said. “On June 23, 2011, the Secretary of the Air Force accepted the resignation of an Airman who asked to be separated under the provisions of [DADT].”

Harper said that all four individuals discharged had made voluntary statements regarding their sexual orientation and had asked to be “separated expeditiously.” . . .

II. The Church hounds a victim beyond the grave

This item seems to me just plain nauseating. Without further preamble:

Catholic Church denies funeral mass to San Diego gay businessman

Posted by San Diego LGBT Weekly, Monday, June 27th, 2011

In a decision reminiscent of the Catholic Church’s refusal to hold a funeral mass in 2005 for openly gay businessman John McCusker, Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Little Italy has canceled a funeral mass scheduled this Thursday morning for openly gay businessman John Sanfilippo, owner of the SRO Lounge, a popular gay cocktail bar.

Sanfilippo died on Friday, June 24.

City Commissioner Nicole Murray Ramirez, a friend of the Sanfilippo family, talked to his partner of 30 years, Brian Galvin. “The Sanfilippo family and Brian are, of course, devastated and are trying to get the mass in another church,” Murray Ramirez said.

When the parish priests found out about the gay relationship of Sanfilippo and Galvin, the priests said they were uncomfortable with Sanfilippo and Galvin’s relationship, according to Murray Ramirez, adding the church notified the family on Sunday that the Thursday funeral mass was canceled. . . .

I hate to be judgmental (chuckle), but this strikes me as beyond the pale even for the Church of Bigotry, Hatred, and Fear. The San Diego LGBT Weekly story notes that City Commissioner Ramirez has contacted the San Diego Diocese "for a clarification of its policy of funeral masses for LGBT Catholics and is planning to press for a policy statement from Bishop [Robert] Brom." It should be interesting to see how the bishop responds (or doesn't).

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