The Gates of Hell

Ray McGovern looks over the record of SecDef Robert Gates and finds that he is not the right man for the job in the Obama administration. Highly recommended.

Blog Simple agrees. As we stated before, the first crucial test of the Obama administration will be taking control of the military and the intelligence apparatus (that is more and more part of the military). Gates has worked hand in glove with Petraeus to build the myth of the surge, a tactic that was primarily aimed at getting a Republican elected in 2008. He failed, probably because Iraq was booted off out of the national attention by the economic crisis, and the ineptitude of the candidate.

But he showed quite clearly that he was on board with guiding the military for domestic political concerns. He may be enough of a yes-man to do the same for Obama, but that is certainly not what the military, or the country, need.

An interesting fact in McGovern's article, that I was unaware of, is that Rumsfeld was actually going off the reservation in terms of the surge, and that was probably the reason for his removal, not his manifest incompetence. Incompetence never disqualified anyone in the Bush administration.