Meet the new Rumsfeld, same as the old Rumsfeld
I was not one of those calling for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld didn’t get the war wrong, the entire U.S. government got foreign policy wrong. It’s not that we have a “job” to “get done” in Iraq, a job that Rumsfeld did badly. The entire enterprise was a crime from the beginning, and the entire administration should resign, not just Rumsfeld. Better than half of the Congress should go with them.
But Rumsfeld is out, and now we have Robert M. Gates nominated to succeed him. Lest you think that the Bush administration has learned its lesson, consider these highlights from the Gates bio:
- He has a history of cooking the intelligence: Intelligence cherry-picked for ideological purposes; the claims of a single, unreliable source treated as fact and stovepiped straight up to the White House; a National Intelligence Estimate riddled with dubious claims; efforts made to connect an enemy regime with international terrorism. This will no doubt remind you of 2003 and the run-up to the war against Iraq, but no, these charges come from the 1980s and come from his coworkers at the CIA. Ray McGovern served in the CIA for 27 years and was Gates’s branch chief at the CIA in the early ’70s. He comments that
Bill Casey had this bizarre notion that the Soviets were going to come up through Nicaragua and Mexico into Texas. Reagan even said such things. And Bobby Gates sort of played on that kind of shibboleth. And when Casey mined the harbors, well, Gates wrote a memo that said we ought to bomb them, as well, bomb the tanks. So, you know, whether he believed that or not, this was a deliberate sort of pandering to the known proclivities of Bill Casey and, of course, the President.
- He has a history of lying to Congress about criminal conspiracies in the Executive branch. He told the Iran-Contra independent counsel that he, the deputy director of the CIA, knew nothing at all about Oliver North’s illegal contra resupply operation, the diversion to the contras of profits from covert arms sales to Iran, or the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. These claims of innocence were contradicted by other CIA officials .
George W. Bush couldn’t have nominated a better guy to shred documents for him.