Wednesday, January 08, 2014

Gates of Hell

Disgruntled ex-employee, of course:
In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”
It's easy to march into a bayonet when you're not the one doing the actual marching.

I'm no fan of Obama, but I have to wonder about Gates's account in this case. If he really believed that Obama was sending troops into harm's way without really supporting the announced strategy, Gates should have resigned on the spot and told the world precisely why he'd resigned. Frankly, if what Gates is alleging is true, it would be akin to what's portrayed in this clip from Stanley Kubrick's great anti-war film Paths of Glory:


Maybe I should restate that. I guess I'm hoping that what Gates alleges is not true. Because if it is true, woe betide us.

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