One of those blunt assessments from Gates’ memoir. Others include Gates witnessing Hillary and Obama admit that they opposed the Iraq Surge for political reasons.
He recounts a conversation between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama concerning the Bush administration’s 2007 attempt to change the tempo of the Iraq war through a surge of U.S. troops.
“Hillary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary,” Mr. Gates writes. “…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.”
Obama did a rather cynical dance on the Iraq surge. And it’s rather predictable that he would concede it only “vaguely”. Honesty from O is always vague.
Even more predictably, Biden is a buffoon.
As for Mr. Biden, Mr. Gates said he bristled at the vice president’s attempts to give him orders, reminding him that he wasn’t in the “chain of command.”
He said Mr. Biden was suspicious of military leadership. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue of the past four decades,” Mr. Gates writes.
The White House leadership is despised for its political manipulations.
He added: “The controlling nature of the Obama White House, and its determination to take credit for every good thing that happened while giving none to the career folks in the trenches who had actually done the work, offended Secretary Clinton as much as it did me.”
And despite campaigning on an Afghan surge, Obama never believed in it.
In what appears to be one of Mr. Gates most pointed critiques of Mr. Obama, he describes a White House meeting in March 2011 where Mr. Obama expressed doubts about Gen. David H. Petraeus, the man he had chosen to lead the war effort, as well as Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Mr. Gates writes. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”
That’s over 1,600 soldiers dead for a political war that Obama never believed in.
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