Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Adventurer]

Robert Gates, a Cautious Player From a Past Bush Team

By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 � In choosing Robert M. Gates as his next defense secretary, President Bush reached back to an earlier era in Republican foreign policy, one marked more by caution and pragmatism than that of the neoconservatives who have shaped the Bush administration�s war in Iraq and confrontations with Iran and North Korea.

Soft-spoken but tough-minded, Mr. Gates, 63, is in many ways the antithesis of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the brash leader he would replace. He has been privately critical of the administration�s failure to execute its military and political plans for Iraq, and he has spent the last six months quietly debating new approaches to the war, as a member of the Iraq Study Group run by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton.

Mr. Gates last served in Washington 13 years ago, and Mr. Bush made clear on Wednesday that he regarded his nominee as someone who would bring new perspective to the final two years of his tenure.

It was under Mr. Bush�s father that Mr. Gates first rose to influence, as deputy national security adviser and then director of central intelligence. He was not part of the group that advised the current President Bush during his 2000 campaign, and he has publicly questioned the administration�s approach to Iran, saying in a 2004 report for the Council on Foreign Relations that its refusal to talk to the Tehran government was ultimately self-defeating.

[I have my misgivings about Mr. Gates, but I prefer people of the mold of Bush senior than the neo-conservatives. They are more balanced in their approach.]

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/nyt592.html

[Rteacher]

So, Gates is more guarded - better than gates not being guarded, I suppose ...

I've heard some analysts compare Rumsfeld to Kennedy's also "brash" Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, who was partly responsible for Bay of Pigs and Viet Nam failures. He later apologized for his mistakes and was let go (according to some...) when his recommendations to President Johnson (LBJ) "amounted to him saying that all the policies he had been promoting for years were wrong, and that his strategy for winning the war was a failure..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara
I don't think that Rumsfeld is ready to admit that just yet, and he had to be replaced by someone who at least symbolized change, and who in fact has been critical of U.S. conduct of the Iraq war and foreign policy in that region (including not speaking to Iran...)

[Gopher]

[Rteacher]

"Partly responsible", while rather vague, is certainly more precise than "largely responsible", and it's hardly a stretch with respect to Bay of Pigs, considering the regret expressed by McNamara himself for his role in it:

When McNamara left office in 1968, he told reporters that his principal regret was his recommendation to Kennedy to proceed with the Bay of Pigs operation, something that "could have been recognized as an error at the time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara

[Gopher]

I guess so. Still, if I were looking to uncover the Bay of Pigs's causes and origins, on the U.S. policymaking side, I would have far bigger fish to fry than McNamara, who literally had hardly anything at all to do with it.

At worst, he failed to object to something that others had been planning and promoting since Eisenhower.

At this point in his life, where you are getting your cite, he had lost faith in himself, was soulsearching, and being overly self-critical -- partly to establish and bolster his own credibility with his audience, who, as he makes clear in his introductory remarks in his book much later, was the cynical, antiEstablishment mob; partly because he had been wringing his hands with much guilt over Vietnam for quite a while, to the point where, I think, he was somewhat overcome by it.

We cannot simply take things people say at face value. No matter what McNamara may have said, the factual record does not show him as responsible, not in any meaningful way, for the Bay of Pigs.