I’m not a fan of Robert Gates and I could write a pretty savage piece on his record going back to the Reagan administration. But, when he was nominated to replace Donald Rumsfeld, I stuck up for him against that kind of criticism because he was about the best we were going to get from the Bush administration. And he did a pretty decent job of cleaning up Rumsfeld’s mess, to the degree that it could be cleaned up. The truth is, invading and occupying Iraq with no reality-based plan was so irresponsible (evil, basically) that no human can fix the problems it created.
Gates agreed to stay on for a while in the Obama administration. I didn’t much like the fact that he was invited to do so, but I also saw the benefits for a new president in having some bipartisan cover for his decision to pull us out of Iraq and make other about-faces in foreign and military policy.
Gates was a major skeptic about our decision to get involved in Libya, and I’m grateful to him for doing what he could to help us avoid that quagmire.
He’s also said things since he left the Defense Department that incensed me, but I never expected him to be the kind of person I could actually admire. He’s a smart, competent, soldier in the Realist mold of American imperial foreign policy. Most of what you’d be justified in criticizing him for is really a critique of the entire bipartisan class of foreign policy/intelligence bigwigs in this country. In other words, 95% of the problem with Robert Gates is also the problem with Leon Panetta and Ashton Carter.
But, as I’ve been saying, the record of our foreign policy elites is so bad that people don’t make a distinction between the Panettas and Scowcrofts and the Cheneys and Wolfowitzes. None of them are much trusted at the moment, which is why Trump can attack Gates with impunity and get the better of the argument.
I understood this when Trump attacked McCain, but it’s taking people who live within the power structure of Washington a long time to realize that they have lost their credibility and that this is the precise reason why Trump has rolled over them for over a year now.