In 2008, authors David Horowitz and Ben Johnson released their book, “Party of Defeat.” It chronicled the Democratic Party’s duplicitous efforts regarding its initial support for the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war in Iraq, followed by their attempts to undermine it—for nothing more than crass political considerations. In a his new book, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” former defense secretary Robert M. Gates, who served in both the Bush and Obama administrations, delivers a devastating confirmation of Horowitz’s and Johnson’s arguments.
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In one of the book’s most trenchant passages, Gates notes a “remarkable” exchange he witnessed between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in which both the current president and former secretary of state admitted their opposition to Iraq was all about gaining an edge in the 2008 presidential campaign. “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary,” writes Gates. As for Obama, he also “conceded vaguely that [his] 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,” he adds. |
