Well, the speculation seems finally to have panned out. Robert Gates, the “adult” brought in from the Bush I administration to try to salvage the wreckage left by Rumsfeld, has agreed to stay on as Defense Secretary and give the Obama administration some continuity and a patina of bipartisanship.
I was never all that impressed with Gates, though he was certainly an improvement over Rumsfeld. He strikes me more as a technocrat than a real thinker or leader, and he owes almost his entire career to his loyalty to the Bush I crowd (which was less offensive than the Bush II crowd, but not as sanctified as we tend to remember). Over on the left, Robert Parry at consortiumnews.com has made something of a personal cottage industry of reminding people that Gates back in the 1980s was a pioneer in the disreputable art of politicizing intelligence to suit the prejudices of presidents, and lamenting that the anti-Iraq-war crowd, the original core of Obama’s base, is getting short shrift in the appointment of officials. Folks at the more libertarian-oriented Antiwar.com are equally skeptical of the Obama team.
We may be engaged in different parts of the world under an Obama administration, but prospects for anything resembling a fundamental change in our interventionist foreign policy seem dim indeed.
Gates had a long career in the Intelligence Community, starting at CIA in 1966. Saying that he “owes almost his entire career to his loyalty to the Bush I crowd” is simply not true. Bush was only briefly DCIA (355 days). If anything, Gates would have been a Casey protégé. Within the CIA Gates is held in high regard on par with Sherman Kent and Richard Heuer for his practice of thoroughly reviewing all intelligence articles before their publication.
Bush fancied intelligence as only a waspy Yale Skull and Bones man could, and Reagan probably ceded it to him. But Bush was the amateur and Gates was the professional.