You never see a former defense secretary take on the president of the United States while he is still in office. Until now.
President Obama’s former Defense Secretary Robert Gates rips into President Obama, deriding his leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war in a new memoir, saying the president in 2010 “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
Gates asserts that Obama was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.
Obama, embroiled with heated disagreements with Gates and other top advisers, nevertheless deployed 30,000 more troops in a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a phased withdrawal beginning in 2011.
“I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes.
In the book Duty, Gates said Obama remained uncomfortable with the inherited wars started by his predecessor George W. Bush, and he was extremely mistrustful of the military that was providing him options.
Because Obama and Gates had radically differing world views, it produced a toxic atmosphere that, at least for Gates, became irreparable.
It is almost unprecedented for a defense secretary occupying a central position in the chain of command, to rip into his president before the chief executive finishes his term.
Gates’s book is rife with contradictions because he says of Obama’s chief Afghanistan policies, “I believe Obama was right in each of these decisions.” That particular view is not a universal one; like much of the debate about the best path to take in Afghanistan, there is disagreement on how well the surge strategy worked.
The book, published by Knopf, is scheduled for release Jan. 14.
Gates’ vacillation between derision and praise is found throughout the book. On one hand he calls Obama “a man of personal integrity,” but then he frequently criticized Obama’s leadership capabilities.
It was worse for Obama’s staff. In the book, Gates shows complete disrespect for Vice President Biden and many of Obama’s top aides.
