Former Secretary of Defense Gates slams Obama’s leadership in new book
In the Washington Post Bob Woodward did a column based on a memoir from former Obama Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (pictured above) soon to be released. In the book titled “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.” The forward to the book states, “When Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House, he thought he’d long left Washington politics behind: After working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happily serving as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty.”
Gates outlines in his book an extraordinary and harsh critique of Obama’s actions as Commander in Chief.
Based on the memoir Woodward reports:
Quote—President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he [Gates] 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.”
At one point in the book Gates praised for Hillary Clinton among other things as hard working, bright, tough-minded, funny, etc. However he then mentioned a meeting between Obama and Clinton he found “remarkable” but dismaying.
Quote–He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary… The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.
