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4 GATES' WAY
FORWARD, Part 1 After Rumsfeld, a new dawn? By Mark Perry
In the American movie
Cool Hand Luke - a cult classic in the US -
a drunken Paul Newman faces his jailer. "What we
have here," intones the captain of Road Prison 36,
"is a failure to communicate." The movie has
provided fodder for a gaggle of bloggers, who now
refer to US Lieutenant General Douglas E Lute,
President George W Bush's new "war czar", as "Cool
Hand Lute".
Lute recently made the rounds
of official Washington, telling
everyone that aside from the
advisability of invading Iraq in the first place
(something with which, in private, he had real
problems), the US national security
establishment's failure to coordinate policy, its
failure to communicate, is leading the nation into
a foreign-policy debacle.
Lute's
appointment in May as "war czar" is a talisman of
this disaster. Lute's job, as he sees it, is to
help reverse this potential disaster and shape a
national security establishment that actually
works. His colleagues say he's terribly worried
that he's fated to fail.
Lute's most
powerful ally in his lone battle to rebuild what
he sees as the shattered American national
security establishment is Robert Gates, the
unassuming, seemingly soft-as-a-pillow new
secretary of defense. Gates is Donald
Rumsfeld-in-reverse. Gates is a man who has spent
a career being underestimated. "Gates is
soft-spoken, courteous, a very good listener,
workmanlike, treats people well, has a good sense
of humor - and is completely and absolutely
ruthless," a colleague who has worked with him for
three decades notes.
"It took a lot for
Bob Gates to take that job," former US Marine
Corps commandant Joe Hoar says. "Let me be blunt.
He was president of Texas A&M [University] and
he had the job for life. Why would he take on a
major headache like the Pentagon? He told Bush he
wanted the right to run the Pentagon his way and
he didn't want what he said vetted by the White
House. And Bush was in trouble and he knew it. So
he agreed. And Gates might look like a soft guy,
but he's a realist and he's a patriot and he knows
Washington and he knows what he wants. And he got
it."
What Gates got when he took over last
December was the right to do things his way. "When
Gates showed up at the Pentagon, he was just
stunned," a senior civilian official at the
Defense Department says. "No one knew what was
going on. There were no plans. Nothing worked. The
policy establishment was broken."
In his
first meeting with the major heads of departments,
Gates said they would not be replaced ("We don't
have time for that," he said) and announced that
he would spend the next weeks traveling. In his
first two months as Defense Secretary, Gates might
have spent four days at the Pentagon, if that. "We
just didn't see him," an official said. "He was
elsewhere."
Gates was in the Middle East -
talking with coalition commander General George
Casey and CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid.
Gates talked to the troops, held press
conferences, smiled for the cameras, shook hands -
and decided that America was losing.
"I
think it's pretty clear that Bob spent long
nights, alone, thinking about all of this by
himself," a friend says, "and he just decided to
throw out all of this neo-con stuff and all this
bunk about democracy and Islam and the clash of
civilizations and he decided the country needed to
get back to the basics. What is the mission? Are
we accomplishing it? What do we need to get it
done? Can we do it? How long will it take? How
much will it cost? And he just decided that
everything else is just so much talk. And really
it was a breath of fresh air.
"He just
stopped people talking about that stuff. So he
went in and started to clean it up. And he was
quiet about it, but he made it clear: there are
rules, and if you don't obey the rules you're out.
And there's a chain of command, and if you don't
follow it, you're gone. There's a chain of command
at the Department of Defense, and there's only one
man at the top of it. And he's [Gates] at the top
of it. Maybe at the end he won't fix all of it,
but he's sure going to try."
Starting
at the top After just six weeks on the
job, and after hours of discussions with Casey,
Abizaid and their key combat subordinates, Gates
was convinced that the US senior military
leadership in Iraq and in the Middle East needed
to be replaced. Casey and Abizaid were nearly
exhausted from years of fighting both the Iraqi
insurgency and Rumsfeld. Gates feared both had
lost their edge as well as the confidence of their
subordinate commanders.
In one sense,
Gates was lucky. With Casey due to rotate back to
Washington as the new army chief of staff and
Abizaid up for retirement, the change in command
could be seen as nothing out of the ordinary. The
change would be swift and painless. Neither Casey
nor Abizaid need be embarrassed. Both men would be
given parades, medals and handshakes. "There would
be no blood on the floor," a Pentagon civilian
official said of the command change. But no one
was fooled: Casey and Abizaid had been sidelined.
"Gates was particularly disturbed with
Abizaid," a Pentagon official says. "His [Central
Command Regional military] staff had ballooned, it
was way out of wack. There were 3,800 officers in
the region, sitting at their computers in their
little cubby holes. That was more than [president
Dwight D Eisenhower had in Europe in World War II.
Gates came back to Washington and said, 'What the
hell are these people doing? Why aren't they in
the front lines'?"
Abizaid had always had
problems with staffing. One of his jobs at the
Pentagon prior to his Gulf deployment was to
organize former deputy defense secretary Paul
Wolfowitz's staff - "and he actually made it
worse, if you can believe that".
The rap
on Casey was different: "He was simply indecisive,
like [former president] Jimmy Carter. His
commanders would come to him with options and he
would look around the table and say, 'Well
gentlemen, what should we do?' Damn, why was he
asking them? He was the one who was supposed to be
in charge," the Pentagon official says.
Gates was not the only one who had decided
there needed to be a command shift in Iraq.
Retired Army four-star General Jack Keane,
arguably the most influential military thinker in
Washington - and author of the Bush
administration's "surge" strategy from his aerie
position at the American Enterprise Institute -
had come to the same conclusion as Gates.
Keane has direct access to Bush and had
been telling the president he needed a new Iraq
commander. In December, at the
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