Gates’ Memoirs … and the Excellent Example of ISIS

Opponents of U.S. President Barack Obama who were also senior officials in both of his administrations are not few in number; indeed there are many when you add the number of significant but lower-level officials who left the administration. However, the provocative news of the day is former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates breaking his silence to speak bitterly about the two years he spent as defense secretary under Obama. Last Friday, this newspaper ran four press releases from Gates’ memoir “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” a book that has sparked controversy just from the publication of several excerpts in the press. Not surprisingly, the book has been discussed by many, most notably the White House which swiftly responded to the release of these excerpts.

According to what has been published at this point, Gates speaks in a clearly critical way about the Obama administration’s strategy with regard to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. He writes that Obama “was skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail.” Bob Woodward wrote in his review of the book that “In Gates’s highly emotional account, Obama remains uncomfortable with the inherited wars and distrustful of the military that is providing him options.” Gates adds that “Hillary [Clinton] told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary .… The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

Many researchers and writers have criticized Obama’s decisions and policies, but this is the first time that a major official has spoken so extensively and critically of his president. Far from praising the president, the anecdotes recounted by Gates demonstrate Obama’s style of thinking: He is a president who is doubtful to the point of believing Afghanistan will fail, and his opposition to sending more troops into Iraq was not based on military strategy; rather, it was a political stance he adopted so that he would be elected. The problem is that he maintained this stance after coming into office, remaining uneasy with the wars he inherited from his predecessor George W. Bush. What is more dangerous is that the president and commander of the largest military in the world would be taken over by such reservations toward the military establishment that he leads.

This book does not go into the more recent stage of Obama’s policies after what has been called the “Arab Spring,” particularly his policies toward Syria and Iran, both of which have been subject to significant criticism from many politicians and commentators in the U.S. and abroad. It was during this stage that the peculiarities of Obama’s strange way of thinking and decision-making would emerge.

Gates, having held a participatory role in decision-making and administration, had the ability to view the Obama administration’s mistakes from the inside, in a detail to which many other commentators do not have access.

Several weeks ago, David Ignatius wrote an article published in this newspaper in which he expressed fear that Obama is the Gorbachev of America, discussing several hypotheses along these lines. The resemblance between the two men is interesting to contemplate, as they have a lot in common. The most important similarity is that both of them desired to take their countries from undesirable inheritances — archaic in the case of Gorbachev and modern in the case of Obama — into new horizons.

Not everything that drove Gorbachev to perestroika had to do with old guard Soviet policies; rather there were a number of current events that pushed him toward this strategy. And not everything that motivated Obama to act similarly was due to his inheritance from his predecessor; rather there are old events and deeply ingrained orientations in U.S. politics that drove Obama in a similar direction as Gorbachev.

Another similarity between the two men is that both won the Nobel Peace Prize, although there are considerable differences. The former won his prize after achieving his mission, and the latter won before doing a single thing.

Gorbachev backed away from a totalitarian and pyramidal system as a way to build a new, isolated and less influential Russia able to take its natural place in the world. Vladimir Putin is trying to rebuild the old Russia through his policies. Obama, on the contrary, received a strong and triumphant nation and has sought to use soft strategies that have enabled recession, withdrawal and isolationism.

Anyone observing the scene today can clearly see how America’s role has regressed and Russia’s has expanded, not only in the Middle East but globally. Russia, which has posited itself as a protector of military dictatorships, is successfully safeguarding the Assad regime in Syria and the Islamic Republic in Iran. Above all of that, it still maintains the North Korean regime in all its vagaries. Russia is also a strong actor in the Ukraine and in Eastern Europe in general.

While the World Wars ended, and after them the Cold War, the world today is living through fragmented cold and hot wars. It appears that the Middle East is tempestuous and vulnerable to continuous conflicts and disturbance for decades to come, and the U.S. view of the Middle East remains foggy.

A few writers — among them the one who wrote these very lines — warned at the beginning of the Syrian crisis that U.S. and Western hesitation on Syria would create a vacuum inviting terrorist organizations and religious violence in Syria, and that the evils resulting from this hesitancy would extend to Western nations. The most recent of these were the subject of last week’s article entitled “Exploding Beirut.” James Comey, head of the FBI, publicly expressed last Friday the FBI’s “worry” over the possibility that al-Qaida has begun to recruit Americans and other Westerners and has been training them to carry out terrorist acts upon their return from Syria.

The political and cultural debate over terrorism that has been going on in the West for years is a rich one in many ways, but it appears biased and stinted concerning Sunnis and Shiites and the responsibility of the nations that represent these sects. Whenever Sunni terrorism is in focus, Shiite terrorism is ignored, even though Iran’s responsibility in both kinds of terrorism is considerable. And while Iran’s role in Shiite terrorism is obvious, it plays a role in Sunni terrorism as well, particularly after 2001. This is well-known by anyone who has followed how Iran has created, allied with and overseen al-Qaida groups, of which the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant is an excellent example.