Ex-Defense Secretary Gates: Obama didn't believe his own strategy

Conservatives are pretty excited today about news that a new book by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates essentially throws President Obama under the bus - particularly with respect to Afghanistan, where Gates believes Obama really didn't believe his own surge had a chance of working and really just wanted to get out because he didn't believe the war was "his". It is, after all, all about him.

More from an analysis of the book by Bob Woodward in the Washington Post:

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.”

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Obama, after months of contentious discussion with Gates and other top advisers, deployed 30,000 more troops in a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a phased withdrawal beginning in mid-2011. “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes. As a candidate, Obama had made plain his opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion while embracing the Afghanistan war as a necessary response to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, requiring even more military resources to succeed. In Gates’s highly emotional account, Obama remains uncomfortable with the inherited wars and distrustful of the military that is providing him options. Their different worldviews produced a rift that, at least for Gates, became personally wounding and impossible to repair.

I find a lot to be cautious about here. First, every administration is going to have someone leave and then turn around and write a critical book. Gates, a lifelong Republican and a rare Bush Administration holdover who stayed on at the start of the Obama presidency, was clearly a candidate to do so if only on the basis of clear ideological differences. As a veteran of the Reagan Administration, Gates must have been appalled by the lack of seriousness with which Obama and his team approached many national security matters. But at least from what we've seen so far, the Gates book falls far short of a total indictment of Obama - and some of it, at least at this stage, doesn't even make any sense. Gates says Obama didn't believe his own strategy in Afghanistan, only pursuing it to try to appear he was taking the conflict seriously. But then he comes back and says most of Obama's decisions were right. What's that? He didn't believe in his decisions but they were right anyway? I suppose one could argue Obama would make better decisions if he contemplate what he actually believes and then does the opposite. And if Obama believed one thing but did another, how does that square with Gates's contention that Obama is a man of personal integrity? That makes no sense. The somewhat more interesting item to me is Gates's account of a conversation between Obama and Hillary Clinton in which Hillary stated flat out that her opposition to the 2007 Iraq surge was motivated by presidential politics. But even this isn't that big a deal. Everyone knows that everything Hillary does is crassly political, and she doesn't even have any shame about it so why not casually tell Obama she was only taking this or that position on the basis of a political calculation? And again, Gates is all over the place because on the one hand he relates this story but on the other hand he says this about Hillary:

“I found her smart, idealistic but pragmatic, tough-minded, indefatigable, funny, a very valuable colleague, and a superb representative of the United States all over the world.”

What? There's a lot for conservatives to like here. He is brutal toward Joe Biden and demonstrates the problems inherent with letting baldly political left-wingers set national security policy. But as much as anything else, I get the impression that he just came to hate his job and this is his 594-page way of blowing off that steam - and making some money in the process.