Let me accord Gates and Bush the benefit of all doubts and describe them as principled patriots motivated not by ideology but by patriotism and a keen sense of righteousness.
That assessment avoids charging them with being ideologues but it does not excuse them for naïveté. The shoe seems to fit Bush better than Gates. Bush, in my judgment, operated as a Christian determined to fulfill his duty and equally determined to eschew self inflation. His Christian sense of modesty brought him to a point where he failed to fight his corner, failed to impose discipline on his party, misunderstood the real evil inherent in his enemies, and abandoned his party. These missteps and omissions were motivated out of high Christian beliefs but bore decaying fruit.
In the end, his approval ratings were in the tank, his party was on the run, his support in Congress virtually nonexistent, his reputation in the country for decency temporarily destroyed, and, worse, his war aims in limbo. Finally, Bush's reluctance to confront political and electoral realities opened the door to Barack Obama so wide that he was escorted into office with control both houses of Congress, a servile media, and no effective oversight. Small wonder Bush's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan did not survive.
A president who conducts foreign policy must do so in the lights of a realistic domestic policy. Bush simply failed to do this.
Gates professes shock that the president of United States and his Secretary of State, Bitch Clinton, would confess in his presence that their positions on Afghanistan were dictated not by the national interest of the United States but by their own selfish election considerations. Duh?
Gates can hardly claim the excuse of naïveté. Head of the CIA, NSA, Secretary of Defense, himself a congressman, he had been around and he survived in these positions by virtue of his Darwinian survivability in bureaucracies. It is all well and good to wax indignant under your breath, to display your self-righteousness years later in your memoirs, but if you are a man so terribly affected by the prayers of a mother sending her son off to war and you claim never to have forgotten your encounter with her, you act while you still have the power to protect her son.
Gates is telling us in effect that he is shocked because he observes the foreign policy of the United States being run out of the Oval Office as though it were a Chicago precinct. What the hell did he expect? Did he really think that Barack Obama was anything other than an ideologue? A Manchurian Marxist? An opportunist and a mountebank?
Did he have any reason whatsoever to think that Bitch Clinton as Secretary of State would behave in any way more honorably than she did in running a war room whose purpose was to spare her husband impeachment for felonies committed in office by destroying the lives of innocent female victims of her husband's social pathology? Did he expect her to transform herself seamlessly from sluts and nuts to Secretary of State?
John McCain calls Obama fit for office in 2008 and even forbade his followers to use even of his opponent's middle name. Mitt Romney is incapable except for one debate to indict Obama for his really dreadful performance and frightening ideology. Now Gates, years after he surrenders power to do anything about it, professes indignation but indignation spread of oh so evenhandedly among politicians of all stripes.
Gates is not naïve, Gates' problem is that he has no party, no ideology, no matrix upon which to judge malefactors like Obama and Clinton except his own ad hoc sense of righteousness. That simply does not work when the other side is utterly lacking in decency. When will these Rinos confront the reality that they are fighting evil and not playing parlor games?
