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Those skills have made Gates perhaps the most powerful Defense Secretary since Robert McNamara ruled the roost in the Vietnam War era. But for the left, Gates is a disappointing compromise, a constant reminder of Obama's reluctance to fully repudiate Bush's conduct of the war on terrorism. "Gates is an agent of change within his own empire and not within the broader national-security construct. That is the risk Obama ran. He covered his flank but didn't get change," says a Defense policy adviser. White House staffers are no doubt uneasy about their dependency on this...
...Elmendorf acknowledges that he has benefited enormously from the work Orszag did before he left for the Obama White House. Orszag expanded the CBO staff, particularly the number who specialize in health care, and produced volumes of research on the subject. Nonetheless, Elmendorf says, the workload this year has been such that his staff has been working six to seven days a week, with computer traffic often continuing until...
...Gates, who took over the Pentagon from Donald Rumsfeld in 2006, accepted Obama's request to stay on and work for the new Administration, many people assumed he wouldn't last long - and that even if he stayed, his clout would shrink in a White House suddenly populated by left-leaning staffers suspicious of anyone associated with George W. Bush foreign policy. And yet Gates has achieved "two victories in one year," in the words of an in-house fan. In December he won passage of a watershed Pentagon budget that shifted spending from theoretical, conventional wars to the unconventional...
...symbolism of Gates employing the very machines left behind by the Soviets is more unsettling than ironic. Before finally throwing his support behind McChrystal's push for a troop surge late last year, Gates repeatedly warned that even the Soviets could not win with 110,000 troops in Afghanistan. Gates should know, since he was one of the reasons the Soviets failed. As deputy director of intelligence at the CIA in the 1980s, he signed off on the decision to ramp up U.S. aid to the mujahedin, including the supply of Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Gates plotted with President Mohammed...
...consummate technocrat, a comforting presence who puts a face on the predictability of uncertainty. His Wichita monotone and old-fashioned speeches about service and duty exude a sense of calm and control - just what the Pentagon needed at the end of 2006 as an antidote to Rumsfeld. Gates had left government in 1992 after the elder Bush's defeat and became president of Texas A&M before being summoned back to Washington by George W. Bush. At Gates' confirmation hearings, Democratic Senator Carl Levin asked whether the U.S. was winning the war in Iraq. Gates replied, "No, sir." With those...