Best endorsement for Obama & Biden: Robert Gates wants more adoration.
Last edited Sat Jan 11, 2014, 12:28 PM - Edit history (1)
Sounds like Gates is upset that the Prez & VP is not allowing the military to set the agenda. He's taking that as a lack of respect.
Robert Gates: Obama's lack of passion disturbs me
"CBS Sunday Morning" last weekend drew its biggest audience in two decades.
The program is likely to post huge ratings for its telecast this weekend, which features Rita Braver's interview with former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The program starts at 9 a.m. Sunday on WKMG-Channel 6.
Gates is promoting his memoir, "Duty," which he calls a non-partisan take on polarized Washington. But his criticisms of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have made the most headlines.
Gates repeatedly praises Obama in the book but finds that the president lacks conviction.
"It's one thing to tell the troops that you support them, it's another to work at making them believe that you believe as president that their sacrifice is worth it. And that they must succeed," Gates says. "President Bush did that with the troops -- when I was secretary. I did not see President Obama do that. It was this absence of passion, this absence of a conviction of the importance of success that -- that disturbed me."
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/blogs/tv-guy/os-robert-gates-obamas-lack-of-passion-disturbs-me-20140111,0,3406725.post
= new reply since forum marked as read
Gates quotes Obama as saying, “ If I believe I am being gamed . . .” and says he left the sentence “hanging there with the clear implication the consequences would be dire.”
Gates writes that he was “pretty upset,” because he thought “implicitly accusing Petraeus” of “gaming” him at a big meeting in the Situation Room was “inappropriate, not to mention highly disrespectful of Petraeus.”
“As I sat there,” Gates recalls, “I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
But Obama’s distrust of Petraeus was clearly related to the sequence of events related to Obama’s policy decision on Afghanistan and Petraeus’s signaling his desire to undermine it – all of which Gates omits from his account...
Whatever Petraeus did in the early weeks of 2011 to raise the ire of Obama in regard to the withdrawal issue, it was against the backdrop of repeated indications that Petraeus was hoping to use both his alliances with Gates and Clinton and pressures from the Republicans in Congress to push back the previously agreed date for beginning withdrawal and handoff of responsibility to the Afghan government.
Gates knew, therefore, that Obama was reacting to a history of having already been “gamed” not only by Petraeus himself but also by his bureaucratic allies maneuvering to remove the restrictions on the Afghan War that Obama had imposed. The self-serving Gates account conceals the dishonest tactics employed to get Obama’s agreement to the Afghan War escalation.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/former-secretary-of-defense-robert-gates-conceals-real-story-of-gaming-obama-on-afghan-war/5364761
There are some obvious parallels between the way the military has tried to play Obama and the the way they tried to play JFK.
Although I will give Gates some credit for his hubris in putting his name to these selective critiques of President Obama. Allen Dulles made his case anonymously through his friends at Fortune Magazine.
BTW .. credit to you Octafish for revealing the true nature of Robert Gates for years now. Kudos also to Robert Parry at consortiumnews.com
