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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.