10 Gates Gripes You Haven’t Heard Yet -- Margaret Slattery and Blake Hounshell, Politico Magazine
Bob Gates roiled Washington this week with Duty, his unvarnished memoir of his tenure as secretary of defense for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The book doesn’t come out until Jan. 14, but many newsworthy bits have already made headlines, from Gates’s voluminous complaints about President Obama’s wartime leadership to his bitter criticisms of Congress, which he rips as “uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities, micro-managerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, often putting self (and reelection) before country.” Here are 10 Gates gripes that haven’t made the rounds yet.
On bombing Syria’s nuclear reactor:
Beginning in April 2007, when the Israelis presented the Bush administration with evidence that the Syrian regime was building a nuclear reactor, a debate broke out over whether the United States should take it out, as Israeli officials urged. At one point, Gates relays, President Bush pulled him aside and said he appreciated the secretary’s concerns about an unprovoked U.S. strike: “He knew that [national security adviser Stephen] Hadley, [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice, and I had discussed the ‘Tojo option’—referring to the Japanese prime minister who ordered the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor—earlier that morning and simply said, ‘I’m not going to do that.’” Gates also complains about the Israeli government’s influence in the White House, especially through Vice President Dick Cheney. “The United States was being held hostage to Israeli decision making,” he writes.
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My Comment: I would not call these "10 Gate Gripes" .... I would call them disturbing revelations on how U.S. government policy has been conducted for the past few years.
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