Was Gates tapped because of his Contra experience in Nicaragua?

[BurtWorm]

Thomas Powers' Op-Ed in today's Times suggests this question:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/opinion/30powers.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

...

About 20 years ago, a friend and I were picking up a takeout dinner from a Vietnamese restaurant in Washington run by Tran Van Don, one of the generals who organized the 1963 coup. Tran pointed out a portly, white-haired man at a table overlooking the room, dining alone: it was his old friend, Lucien Conein. In a sense, they were both exiles. I often think about the conversations they must have had. The war that followed their coup killed 57,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese.

It was during this period, in 1968, that Robert Gates joined the C.I.A., specializing in Soviet strategic arms programs. In the early 1980s, the central intelligence chief, William Casey, picked him to be the C.I.A.’s deputy director, which won him a front row seat while the agency put a contra army into the field to bring down the Sandinista government of Nicaragua — a goal Casey and President Reagan never publicly admitted.

The contras were expensive and ineffective. The public turned against the war, and eventually Congress passed the Boland Amendment, blocking all further expenditure on the clandestine war. Then began what would be known as the Iran-contra scandal, and then ended Mr. Gates’s knowledge of what his chief was up to. So Mr. Gates testified, and the Iran-contra special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, never managed to prove otherwise, despite years of tireless effort.

Mr. Gates kept out of trouble and earned the trust of two presidents, who both nominated him to run the C.I.A. The first time opposition was so bitter that Mr. Gates withdrew his name; the second time, he was confirmed only after drawn-out hearings in which agency professionals accused Mr. Gates of shaping intelligence to please his bosses. Three volumes of hearing records prove only that Mr. Gates knew how to answer the question that he was asked and could get the people who worked for him to do likewise.

Today the choice facing Washington is not quite as stark as the one that confronted Lyndon Johnson in 1965, but it is close. Mr. Gates has spent the last nine months working as a member of the Iraq Study Group, whose much awaited recommendations will be revealed next Wednesday. Getting out is the simplest remedy, but no one wants to shoulder the blame for what follows. Staying the course has already been rejected by the president. That leaves only some kind of altered or renewed effort to postpone the day of reckoning....

[Octafish]

1. Vietnam and Iraq have many parallels.

But the big similarity, Thomas Powers notes, is that U.S. presidents "remain the same."

True in regards to LBJ and the Crazy Monkey (and Poppy and Pruneface and Nixon and Ford).

Couldn't disagree more in regards to JFK. He went against the advice of the Pentagon, the State Department, his Cabinet and Congress and said "No" to war in Vietnam and signed orders stating the US would withdraw all military personnel by the end of 1964.

http://www.history-matters.com/vietnam1963.htm

Days after he was deceased, LBJ signed orders countermanding JFK's.

What was it that JFK saw that LBJ and the rest of the War Party could not see?

Peace.