Word: warring
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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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...
...first-rate apparatchik, a gifted infighter and faithful servant? In this Administration, Gates is the key broker on the question that haunts every U.S. President: how and when to wield military force. But in the last years of a long public career, that makes him the face of a war in Afghanistan that is going badly and getting worse. "Gates has too much experience in D.C. not to get out when he's on top," says an old friend and admirer. But has he waited too long this time? (See photos of Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize...
Like his fellow Cold War survivor the Doomsday Plane, Gates has come to embody power, control and an astonishing longevity. Just 5 ft. 8 in., with small hands and feet, the demure 66-year-old Kansan has outlasted seven Presidents as well as most of his fellow bureaucrats and policymakers. He's the only entry-level CIA analyst to rise to the top job, director of central intelligence. And he's the only Secretary of Defense ever to be asked to stay on in a rival party's Administration. He has thrived through a combination of endurance, pragmatism and bureaucratic...
...Council on Foreign Relations and a skeptic of the Administration's strategy in Afghanistan. Gelb points out that in early December, days after President Obama's West Point speech announcing his decision to send 30,000 additional troops (on top of the 32,000 deployed in 2009) to the war zone and then begin bringing them home in July 2011, Gates went on the Sunday talk shows to say the withdrawal would depend on conditions on the ground. "The President didn't challenge him," Gelb says. "That tells you most of what you need to know about Gates' role...
...Intelligence Committee who is now advising the White House on intelligence. "He knows just when to give his advice, to whom to give it, and he's extremely good at forming alliances with other people in the government to advance his point of view." (See a slideshow of the war in Afghanistan up close...