by Barry Rubin
For the last five
years, I have waited for the other shoe to drop.
In 2008, the American people elected an
incompetent and foolish president, Obama. President Obama knew that he could
only trust a handcuffed politician and loyalist like Hillary Clinton as
secretary of state. He then later appointed the pompous John Kerry to fill this
capacity. Yet this “gang that couldn’t shoot straight”
was a ticking time bomb.
Three strikes and you’re out. Let me list
them:
- Obama: incompetent and disinterested in policy (president).
- Clinton: interested in policy but a potential rival politician, so she could not be assigned to do anything too productive (secretary of state).
- John Kerry: assigned to do productive work but totally incompetent (secretary of state).
Imagine former Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates–who recently published Duty:
Memoirs of a Secretary at War, in which he criticized Obama and his
administration–seething. Certainly, he never would have gotten as far as he did
if he hadn’t been an opportunist, but U.S. interests, not politics, was his
duty. He knew that Americans were being sacrificed uselessly to make the
situation “work.”
Gates feels that he has a personal responsibility
to the American public. Obama and Clinton, on the other hand, are pure
politicians, and for all they try, they cannot get rid of their “me-first”
mindsets. In other words, Obama and Clinton don’t want to be rid of “how does it
benefit me?” as their first priority, while Gates cannot get rid of that squeaky
little voice asking “what about America’s interests?” as well as “what stupid
thing will Vice President Joe Biden say next?”
Here we have to remind everyone that politicians
have to deal with the future of politics, post-Obama. And those future
careerists like Gates need to be quiet and disciplined, because they know that
they cannot risk offending other political interests, from whom they might need
future support.
Career officials need supporters, especially in
order to rise up the ladder.
One day, as a fourteen year old, I was riding the
bus in Washington, D.C. I overheard two men, who were obviously government
officials, talking. One said, “These people are so stupid. They don’t know what
they are doing. They all make the wrong decisions, but after all they and I will
just go into retirement.”
Almost 50 years later, I still haven’t forgotten
this.
Washington, D.C., is an endless game of thrones.
But for once it came to what may be more commonly called a perfect storm. Gates
was the one knight who had nothing to lose in publishing his memoirs, except
reviews–which could only increase readership. On the one hand, he could have
done the noble thing; on the other hand, he could have acted in his own
interests. His interests and the public’s, however, were congruent.
Gates could see himself as finally achieving
genuine, national self-interest, as a real protector. He wasn’t able to do any
better, and it wasn’t his fault; it was fault of the American people for not
electing a competent president.
For example, Gates knew that the Iraq policy
around 2007-2008 was the best idea. He knew that Kerry, Obama, and Clinton
opposed it for the wrong political reasons. He knew that he would lose his fight
against them and would have to confine that to the loneliness of the voter’s
box. Then he would have to support their decisions loyally.
Most people do not face such a situation, and it
is very difficult. Men would die, U.S. interests would be abandoned, and
terrorists would be strengthened while Gates had to listen to unpatriotic
sentiments such as those from Joe Biden. He even wrote that he considered
resigning due to Biden. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign
policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” Gates wrote in
his memoirs.
Yes, everyone would consider resigning. But you
can only resign once.
Notice the timeline.
He was deputy director of the CIA from 1986 to
1989.
He accepted the job of CIA director in November
of 1991 and then permanently resigned in January 1993. He never returned to the
CIA.
He became secretary of Defense in 2006 under
George W. Bush. On December 1, 2008, President Obama announced that Gates would
remain in his position as secretary of Defense during his administration, at
least for the first year. When he retired in 2011, Gates said, “I think that it
would be a mistake to wait until January 2012.… This is not the kind of job you
want to fill in the spring of an election year.”
As a former civil servant, he may well have been
correct to state it that way; let’s see, there’s Obama, Clinton, Kerry, Biden,
and Harry Reid–how could they do more danger to U.S. interests? Most of the
other senior foreign policy official experts would have said “duh.” Under such
serious circumstances, I think he was sending a signal. And frankly, almost
everyone had heard the same thing privately from these officials.
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