In "The Professional," Fred Kaplan's extended New York Times Magazine profile of Defense Secretary Robert "I Am Not Now Nor Have I Ever Been Donald Rumsfeld" Gates today, the editors bury on page 96 what is to me the most telling anecdote in the story.
It won't fit in the intro, so join me overleaf to find this revelation.
From Kaplan's article:
At last summer’s debate on Iraq, Cheney urged the president to resist the Democrats’ call for troop withdrawals and to prolong the surge indefinitely. But the Joint Chiefs argued that they didn’t have the troops to sustain the surge beyond the summer of 2008. Gates made a more political point: that if there were no prospects for gradual but substantial troop withdrawals, popular support for the war would evaporate, and the next president would probably pull out all the troops as quickly as possible, resulting in Iraq’s potential collapse. On the plane from Fort Hood, Gates spelled out his position. "We need bipartisan support for a prolonged presence in Iraq," he said. "But to do that, we need to demonstrate that we’re drawing down to lower levels." He recalled watching one of the early Democratic presidential debates. The moderator asked the candidates if they would promise to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, the end of the first term. The three candidates with the highest poll ratings all declined to make that pledge. Gates remembered saying to himself, "My work here is done."
(emphasis mine)
Gates' admission that the primary reason George Bush hired him to replace Rumsfeld was to make an extended occupation of Iraq palatable enough to Americans that the Democratic front-runners for the 2008 Presidential nomination would refuse to reject it as Iraq policy should be front page news; but as is typical of the corporate poodle press in America, the importance of this point went right over his head.
Never mind that all the areas in Iraq where violence has declined the most are the areas where the US has the smallest number of troops; never mind that, given the reduction in American troops in Sunni areas, native Iraqi Sunni leaders have themselves begun tracking down and killing Wahabist al Qaeda forces.
Never mind that all the evidence shows that it is precisely the presence of our troops, propping up a corrupt Shia-dominated puppet government, that is preventing the Shia and Sunni and Kurd leaders from coming to their own resolution of their differences.
As long as the major Democratic candidates for President can be conned into accepting the inevitability of an extended military occupation of Iraq, Bob Gates considers his work done.
Well, our work is just beginning.
Let's get it started!