One more reason to be a pissed off that Rummy was canned for this guy:
Gary G. Sick, a prominent expert on Iran, worked with Robert M. Gates in the White House during the Ford and Carter administration. He says the nomination of Gates to replace Donald M. Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense marks a “moment of real change” for the administration of George W. Bush.
[…]QUESTION: Well, now let’s play prognosticator a bit. Gates has obviously been hired to replace Rumsfeld with the idea being to work on Iraq primarily. Yet being in on the National Security Council meetings, he’ll be deeply involved one way or the other with Iran policy. Do you think he’ll have much input on that?SICK: There are at least a couple of areas where I think his input could be extremely important. As you’re probably aware, there has been a lot of talk about the United States launching an attack against Iran. Seymour Hersh [of the New Yorker] has been writing on the subject and Scott Ritter [a former U.N. arms inspector in Iraq] has been saying that the war has already begun. There were rather hysterical reports in the last month or so [in TIME] about a U.S. naval task force that was arriving in the Persian Gulf, and that this was going to be the moment when a preemptive strike was launched. Of course, that didn’t happen but there is a kind of uneasiness about that possibility.
I would think that at a minimum the nomination of Gates as secretary of defense would push that even further back to the backburner than it is presently. I’ve never really thought this was going to happen, but actually I have been a minority in thinking that in some circles. But now with Gates coming in, it’s very difficult for me to imagine this guy, who is a consummate realist and pragmatist, launching a wild attack against Iran with the idea that somehow we’re going to solve all of our problems with Iran with a military strike. I just can’t see him doing that. The other side is that the Defense Department under Rumsfeld has been building up, just as it did before the Iraq war, its own intelligence service, which basically takes a jaundiced view of everything the CIA and other intelligence agencies do. That’s the organization that came to the conclusion Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction and they had close relationships with al-Qaeda and so forth.
That’s the shop it came out of. Someone named Adam Shulsky is heading it. The interesting thing is that shop is now being reconstituted in the Defense Department and I would be very surprised if Gates, with his really impeccable intelligence credentials, would go along with that kind of rogue intelligence operation. So I would suspect that if there were people who were trying to play the same game that was played before the Iraqi invasion, that is, cherry-pick the intelligence and decide what looks scariest and then get the highest authorities to use that as a justification for invading Iran, if that was what anybody had in mind I should think he would put a stop to that. I don’t think he’s going to be called up to decide whether we open diplomatic relations with Iran right away but at least he would have quite a bit to say about the military aspects of this.
I’m thinking Gates won’t have any problem getting through nomination now that we have all learned what a appeaser he is. The Democrats will love him.
I mean come on, he will bring “pragmatism” to the war on radical Islam? What will that pragmatism look like please? Will we now just bow and pray to Allah? Because that is the ONLY way to appease this evil.
And the words “Realist” and “Pragmatist” are only code words for appease.
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