GATES IS TOO MUCH OF A COLD WAR “RETREAD” TO RETAIN Many Democrats and Republicans are urging president-elect Barack Obama to allow Robert Gates to continue as Secretary of Defense. Yet Obama has said he doesn’t want a cabinet made up of “retreads.” Gates, a career intelligence professional and “retread” par excellence, has served every president since Richard Nixon. He worked for Democratic and Republican administrations as a C.I.A. officer, and also spent nine years on the staff of the National Security Council, under four presidents of both political parties. He has supported the Bush administration’s most expansive views on national security that provides for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ approval. He deflected questions about military action taken lack month against Syria by saying the it was up to the State Department to determine whether this violated international law and he continues to equivocate on bombing nuclear sites in Iran. Gates recently said in a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that he wants to “modernize” the nation’s nuclear arsenal as hedge against all “rising and resurgence powers” and “rogue nations” – thus expanding the traditional view of nuclear deterrence supported by President Bush and contributing to nuclear proliferation. And, of course, he supports building the controversial U.S. national missile shield system on Russia’s eastern European borders. Among other things it cannot afford to offend Russia whose aid is needed to deal with Iran.The new Obama administration doesn’t need this kind of combination of Cold War and 911 baggage as it tries to move U.S. diplomacy in a new, more cooperative, humane direction. As a “retread,” Gates’s most well-known and controversial service occurred when he was deputy director of the CIA under Bill Casey. In that capacity he recommended air strikes against Nicaragua then led by Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and was later implicated in the Iran-Contra affair. Among other things, he wrote most of Casey’s testimony misleading testimony to Congress about these illegal arms sales to Iran via Israel with the profits going to the Contras. Later, Iran-Contra Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh did not indict Gates, but concluded that his statements about his involvement in the affair “often seemed scripted and less than candid.” After Gates became acting director of the CIA when Bill Casey became ill in December 1986, Reagan nominated him to head the agency, but concerns by Senators prompted Reagan to withdraw his nomination. In 1991 President George H. W. Bush nominated him again and this time, although thirty-one Democrats voted against him, Gates used his friendship with David Boren, the Democratic chair of Senate Intelligence Committee, to become CIA director until Bill Clinton came to office. In less than a full day of hearings the Senate gave unseemly swift approval of Gates to replace Rumsfeld in December 2006. Although this was just another example of Bush appointing one “retread” to replace another from his father’s administration who had a tainted reputation, the Democrats dutifully fell in line as though anyone would be better than “retread” Rumsfeld. What had happened to the doubts about his ethics and the spinning of intelligence and misleading Congress in the 1980s? Have the 12 of the Democratic Senators who were still in Congress of the thirty-one who voted against Gates in 1991 forgotten Senator Sam Daschle’s (D-SD) words back then: “We can’t afford to take the chance that a fellow who has deliberately trimmed intelligence and taken liberties with the truth will reform.” There is no evidence that Gates has ever stood up to his superiors in the governmental hierarchy or fostered forward-looking ideas in his previous positions. His role, to date, has been to play a conciliatory role with Congress, dampen complaints within the Pentagon, calm criticism from retired military officers, and bask in the success of the surge. There will be no “new way forward” in U.S. foreign policy with “retread” Gates as Secretary of Defense in the new Obama administration. A better appointment to encourage diplomatic innovations would be Richard J. Danzig, the former Navy secretary who has been a senior foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign -- serves as deputy at the Pentagon, ready to move up when Gates moves on. Other possibilities include Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who served in the 82nd Airborne Division, or better yet Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam war hero and retiring Republican Senator from Nebraska who opposes the war in Iraq and other Bush foreign policies of the Bush administration. Obama should make it clear that some Cold War “retreads” cannot be retained. Joan Hoff Big Sky, Montana Author: Faustian Foreign Policy from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush

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