Ray McGovern: "Gates, Hadley: More of the Same"

[leftchick]

Initial press reports on information provided to the Senate by Robert Gates, President George W. Bush’s nominee for the post of defense secretary, show Gates hewing very closely to the rhetoric of his predecessor. Gates is more parrot than innovator in his responses to a questionnaire given him by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which takes up his nomination on Dec. 5.

None of this surprises those of us who for decades have watched Gates make career after career out of trimming his sails to the prevailing winds. No one should expect Gates to depart one iota from the position of the President, who said Nov. 28, “I’m not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.” In answering the senators’ questions, Gates insisted that an early pullout would risk “leaving Iraq in chaos dangerous consequences both in the region and globally for many years to come.”

No surprise either in Gates’ strong endorsement of spending billions more on—and prematurely deploying—the missile defense system that was Rumsfeld’s pet project. Even if it can be made to work (and this has yet to be demonstrated), the system is of highly dubious utility in preventing the kinds of terrorist attacks that appear far more likely than a nuclear-tipped missile from a “rogue” state like North Korea or Iran—if they ever succeed in developing one.

Gates lumps the two together, saying, “North Korea and Iran continue to develop longer range missiles and are determined to pursue weapons of mass destruction.” In attributing this intention to Iran, Gates demonstrates that he has lost none of his verve as master-practitioner of what we intelligence alumni call “faith-based intelligence.” Among serious intelligence analysts, especially in the Department of Energy, where the expertise lies, the jury is out on whether Iran is embarked on a weapons-related nuclear program—and, if so, how soon it might have a deliverable nuclear weapon. And the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, also keeps saying existing evidence permits no hard and fast conclusions.

http://consortiumnews.com/2006/112906a.html