you worry some... or at least wonder some... of that cold-land Bear raising its head. here are a couple of snippets from an article on Gates when he was coming in as Sec of Defense... aside from other reasons he might be good to have around awhile, he is well-versed in Russia (and from reading about him, I have the impression he keeps current and changes with the times as they might dictate)...
Robert Gates will bring to the job the attentive style of a listener. He rose at the CIA in the 1980s by making himself indispensable to his boss, William Casey. He was the brightest Soviet analyst in the shop, so Casey soon appointed him deputy director overseeing his fellow analysts. I once waded through Gates's graduate dissertation for his doctorate in Soviet studies at Georgetown. It was a work of solid, earnest scholarship -- good, but not flashy. Rumsfeld might have described it as a long, hard slog. But it illustrates Gates's best qualities: his intellectual seriousness, his professionalism, his lack of "side," as the British say of good civil servants.
----------
The new secretary will bring something else to the table, and it may be a crucial factor in the months ahead. He came back into the Bush administration's spotlight because of his work as a member of the Iraq Study Group, headed by Bush 41's secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and former representative Lee Hamilton. Gates embodies the group's effort to find a bipartisan policy for Iraq. In that sense, he will go to the Pentagon with an invisible mission statement that can be summed up in two words: "exit strategy." He won't want to leave Iraq quickly or dangerously, but unlike Rumsfeld, he won't fight the problem.
washingtonpost.com |
