Klein on Gates--recalling my FP.com quote on Gates' selection
Friday, June 5, 2009 at 3:38AM IN THE ARENA: "Gates Unbound: How the Defense Secretary helped turn Iraq around, shook up the Pentagon and won over Obama," by Joe Klein, Time, 8 June 2009.
Klein is a bit notorious for falling in love with profiled subjects (look who's talking!), but that allows him to peer deeply and record correctly.
Here's a bit that exactly mirrors the response to FP.com (pretty sure, from memory--maybe it was the WSJ?) when Gates was selected by Bush back in 2006. What I said then was something to the effect: everything you need to know about how Gates will handle Iraq can be found by asking him the following question, "How do you feel about China as a threat?"
I said, if Gates says "China is the threat," then you can forget about him being a useful change agent on Iraq, COIN, etc. But if he offers a sensible take, then the promise of real change is there.
Here's the Klein bit:
"If you ever get a chance to interview Donald Rumsfeld," a retired four-star general told me in 2005 [bet it was Keane], "ask him two questions and see which one lights up his eyes. Ask him what our force posture should be toward China 10 years from now. And then ask him what tactical changes we should make on the ground in Iraq as a result of the last three months of combat. I'll be you anything, he gets more excited about China."
And that was the problem. The Cheney-Rumsfeld axis, which essentially ran nation-security policy in the first half of the Bush administration, was stuck in the Cold War.
That meant, when the going got tough in Iraq, the problem became, in Klein's cool phrase, a "bureaucratic orphan."
Damn straight.
As soon as Gates takes over he summons Petraeus ("no favorite of Rumsfeld's") from Leavenworth . . .
I believe I had dubbed him a "monk of war" . . .
Still, Rummy put Petraeus in Leavenworth, and Mattis in Quantico, and Wallace in Leavenworth and then TRADOC . . .
Here's the bit no one wants to hear in retrospect: Rumsfeld made Gates possible--in ways both good and bad.
Reader Comments (8)
Is he the only SECDEF to have been Director of CIA?
What Gates - and everyone else by the way, including liberal doves and pro-Soviet leftists - had wrong was the actual size of the Soviet GDP and the percentage devoted to military and internal security spending. The former was much smaller than we estimated and the latter was far larger than we believed possible - about 25 % + of their GDP.
Anyone who said the Sovs were spending that much on arms back in 1985 would have been called crazy because such an expenditure would be economically unsustainable ( which it was). So the usual expert estimate of Soviet defense spending hovered in the neighbborhood of 13 %. Liberals generally felt this figure was an *overestimate* and "hardliners" like Gates generally thought it did not capture the true purchasing power but it was a "feasible" figure in the sense of being a sustainable expenditure with belt-tightening for Soviet consumers.
The irony was that Soviet gains that most worried conservatives, expansion in the third world with new Soviet satellites in the 1970's and early 1980's, hastened the collapse of the USSR.
Whatever Soviet military expenditures and GDP both of which are difficult to measure. Two other events really caused some internmal corrosion in the SU and missed to some extent by INTE. First the 1986 core-melt accident at Chenyobl! I was told by Russians that 2/3rds of entire concrete supply of the SU was taken in the first 18 months after accident to encapsulate the reactor. And by the way it now needs redoing. Also what is called the Armenian earthquake also indicated problems. It was not just that the SU military could not get earthmoving equipment into the disaster zone, but they could not even deliver shovels. Eye witnesses reported troops in tears at lack of equipment to help locate and save survivors. Of course after 3 weeks without water trapped victims were dead. Perhaps even one or two weeks trapped post-earthquake without injuries but w/o water is usually enough to kill depending on weather and other factors. In other words time is short.
By the way the area contaminated in SU now off limits for settlement for 500 years although settlers have managed to sneak back in and are farming or doing whatever. Glasnost and Perestroika--did any of that have to do with the computer and international communications revolution?
Did the US win or did SU lose? Looking back in 5 decades will of interesting to comprehensive view of the 70+ years of Soviet rule and its accomplishments and failures.
I think the crises around the nukey Russian and Eastern Europe borders with Balkans, West Europe & 'neutral' Northerners was more involved. Gorbachev needed an opponent that was prudent and reserved, but with apparently strong resources in order to gain and maintain support from a failing Russian elite looking for their future.