Another Year’s Worth Of Gates?

It is hard to visualize Gates staying on as Secretary of Defense for one year unless he is allowed to also retain most of his senior staff, the Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries who actually implement policy decisions. Those positions are coveted by Democratic defense strategists currently toiling in various Beltway “think tanks”, such as the Center for a New American Strategy. If President-elect Obama asks Gates to stay at the Pentagon, he will also be asking ambitious “thinkers” to remain outside, looking in. For a year. And asking Gates to stay, while replacing his Under-Secretary for Policy, probably won't fly (with Gates.)

I must say that I find your analysis very compelling and it brings up points I hadn't thought of before.

If Obama keeps Gates, he should task Gates with two main items:

1) Delivering a plan to get the US out of Iraq
2) Permitting gays to serve in the military

I know this annoys Yglesias (Dems mustn't defer to GOP on defense), but Gates would provide Obama with excellent cover on the Iraq withdrawal.

The problem for Obama is making sure he & Gates have the same plan. It would be baaaaad news for Obama if Gates dropped a protest resignation on him re: some development in Iraq.

Agreed, keeping Gates until withdrawal from Iraq is complete would be good.
I've read, though, that Gates is not nor has ever been a registered Republican.

Expecting the Republicans to play nice on anything after any overture is a delusion. These guys don't do “play nice.” They're not capable, it's not in their DNA. They do attacks and intensely dislike Democrats. Some of the other reasons here are worthy, but expecting the GOP faithful to cooperate with a man they see as a traitor is wishful thinking.

F4S raises an important point: Iraq isn't the only policy question on the DOD agenda, and, even without invoking the image of particular people hoping to get federal jobs, there's a real need to get policies better aligned.

I've decided not to believe any news stories about the transition that don't originate from the transition itself. (I.e., including this one). We've already had a story or two every day that turn out not to reflect reality within the transition, but rather a jockeying for position among 'informal advisors' to the transition. Are they floatimng an idea in the press hoping it'll catch on, hoping it'll get shot down, or just hoping to see their thoughts in the paper? In any case, it isn't about an actual reality that matters to any of us ordinary folks.

Horse****.

President-elect Obama needs to put his team in place, and if he thinks Secretary Gates can be part of that team; so be it. But I can think of a few more equally qualified and probably more compatible people to serve as Secretary of Defense in an Obama Administration.

This is a really good point that I should have considered. Eric Edelman in an Obama administration? That I just don't see. But how could Obama really tell Gates to stay but tell his people to go?

Uh…Gates and the guys with stars on their shoulders have NOTHING to say about withdrawal from Iraq. Iraq is TELLING us to get out. Get out no later than 2011 and that pretty much ends it.

Obama, Gates, or any and sundry assholes in the Pentagon have NOTHING to say on the matter except, “OK, we're leaving. It IS your sovereign nation, afterall.”

On the other hand, I would like to see Undersecretary Mike Vickers stay on.

Keeping Gates is a really bad idea.

In “The Professional,” Fred Kaplan's extended New York Times Magazine profile of Defense Secretary Robert “I Am Not Now Nor Have I Ever Been Donald Rumsfeld” Gates from February 10, 2008, the editors buried on page 96 what was to me the most revealing anecdote in the story.

From Kaplan's article:

At last summer’s debate on Iraq, Cheney urged the president to resist the Democrats’ call for troop withdrawals and to prolong the surge indefinitely. But the Joint Chiefs argued that they didn’t have the troops to sustain the surge beyond the summer of 2008. Gates made a more political point: that if there were no prospects for gradual but substantial troop withdrawals, popular support for the war would evaporate, and the next president would probably pull out all the troops as quickly as possible, resulting in Iraq’s potential collapse. On the plane from Fort Hood, Gates spelled out his position. “We need bipartisan support for a prolonged presence in Iraq,” he said. “But to do that, we need to demonstrate that we’re drawing down to lower levels.” He recalled watching one of the early Democratic presidential debates. The moderator asked the candidates if they would promise to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, the end of the first term. The three candidates with the highest poll ratings all declined to make that pledge. Gates remembered saying to himself, “My work here is done.”

(emphasis mine)

Gates' admission that the primary reason George Bush hired him to replace Rumsfeld was to make an extended occupation of Iraq palatable enough to Americans that the Democratic front-runners for the 2008 Presidential nomination would refuse to reject it as Iraq policy should be front page news; but as is typical of the corporate poodle press in America, the importance of this point went right over his head.

Never mind that all the areas in Iraq where violence has declined the most are the areas where the US has the smallest number of troops; never mind that, given the reduction in American troops in Sunni areas, native Iraqi Sunni leaders have themselves begun tracking down and killing Wahabist al Qaeda forces.

Never mind that all the evidence shows that it is precisely the presence of our troops, propping up a corrupt Shia-dominated puppet government, that is preventing the Shia and Sunni and Kurd leaders from coming to their own resolution of their differences.

As long as the the Democratic President-elect can be conned into accepting the inevitability of an extended military occupation of Iraq, Bob Gates will continue to consider his work done. You can bet that if he continues as Secretary of Defense, he will do his best to con President Obama.

The last eight years show us that if you can find someone competent for a given position, for God's sake, leave him or her in it.

Cleaning up after Rumsfeld was and is an Augean task. We shouldn't lower our estimate of Gates' worth just because he is a Republican, or believes in a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq as an academic matter. If he can find it in himself to execute a withdrawal from Iraq, then he's worth keeping unless someone of equal bureaucratic competence comes along. They may be out there, but I haven't heard any names mentioned yet.

Don't have time to flesh out a complete thought, but just a reminder: there's more to the SecDef job than Iraq. Importance of Iraq? Can't be overstated – however, Gates has made some noise in favor of some things that coincide with a more progressive agenda, such as saying the US military can't be used indefinitely as the only policy tool for combating terrorism, we have to have diplomacy come before military action and use traditional law enforcement techniques. The guy seems competent, as long as he's taking and following orders from a President Obama, I'm okay with him staying on.

“shunting aside his best military advice in favor of his ideologically-driven schemes”

It is the constitutionally mandated task of the civilian leadership, focussed in the person of the President, acting as Commander in Chief to guide the military, not the other way around. This country was built on ideologically-driven schemes, by Jove! and sometimes it takes one ideologically-driven scheme to correct a preceding one.

Anyone who is actively in the military and undermines the leadership of the President in the media does so at some risk to their career in the military, at the least, as we saw in the case of dissenters to the war at times in the past 5 years.

Don't have time to flesh out a complete thought, but just a reminder: there's more to the SecDef job than Iraq. Importance of Iraq? Can't be overstated – however, Gates has made some noise in favor of some things that coincide with a more progressive agenda, such as saying the US military can't be used indefinitely as the only policy tool for combating terrorism, we have to have diplomacy come before military action and use traditional law enforcement techniques. The guy seems competent, as long as he's taking and following orders from a President Obama, I'm okay with him staying on.

“shunting aside his best military advice in favor of his ideologically-driven schemes”

It is the constitutionally mandated task of the civilian leadership, focussed in the person of the President, acting as Commander in Chief to guide the military, not the other way around. This country was built on ideologically-driven schemes, by Jove! and sometimes it takes one ideologically-driven scheme to correct a preceding one.

Anyone who is actively in the military and undermines the leadership of the President in the media does so at some risk to their career in the military, at the least, as we saw in the case of dissenters to the war at times in the past 5 years.