When I predicted last night that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would be gone within a few weeks, I had no idea how soon he would be going.
But the writing was on the wall. When Senator John Warner, the GOP's grey eminence on military matters in the Senate, came back from Iraq declaring that a new approach was needed, it was clear that things would change at the Pentagon soon.
It's tempting to draw an analogy between this Texas President's replacement of his Secretary of Defense and the move of another President from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, when in 1968, he replaced Defense Secretary Robert McNamara with old Washington hand Clark Clifford. Clifford, respected as a solid guy with credibility and no desire to call attention to himself, was charged with enacting a new policy that might extricate the US from the War in Vietnam.
But the analogy breaks down when one remembers that Johnson tapped Clifford in the waning months of his administration, just weeks before LBJ took himself out of the running for re-election and after his seemingly boundless energy and once-endless capacity for hope had burned out. President George W. Bush still has two-plus years left in his presidency and has hopes of going out on a high note.
There is little doubt in my mind that Secretary of Defense-designate Robert Gates has been given a task similar to Clifford's, though. For weeks, President Bush's tweaking with the meaning of the phrase, stay the course, has indicated changes in tactics and strategy in Iraq were in the offing.
Unlike Clifford, who, as I recall, began his tenure at Defense with no particular plan, only a mandate, Gates may already have a blueprint for turning repsonsibility for the security of the country over to the Iraqi government. The fact that he has been serving on the congressionally-appointed Baker-Hamilton commission, charged with looking into alternative exit strategies from Iraq, may indicate that. Tonight on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the usually savvy David Brooks denigrated the frequency with which members of the Administration and Congress talk about new policy recommendations likely to be laid out by the commission. There is nothing new to be said, Brooks asserted, and all that's left is a set of unattractive and difficult options which everybody can see with or without a commission.
All that's true. But it misses the point.
The Baker-Hamilton commission gives the White House and the Congress a classic out. Washington elected officials love receiving tough recommendations from non-elected heavyweight commissions. It gives them cover and justification for taking tough decisions which they might not otherwise find politic to take.
No doubt both the President and Congressional leaders have been kept apprised of the deliberations of the commission.
Who better to implement them than a respected member of that group like Robert Gates?
The nomination of Gates is interesting for another reason. For much of the past five years, the civilian leadership of the Pentagon and certain folks in the White House, anonymously, have painted our intelligence services as hapless twits who have routinely gotten things wrong. (This is something I've never seen attributed to our general officers, by the way.) Now, the Defense Department will be headed by someone whose background is in intelligence.
The departure of Rumsfeld is what I thought would be the first step in a major shift in US policy in Iraq. I just didn't think that it would come so soon. But I guess it should have been expected from a President who calls himself, "the decider."
[This was cross-posted at RedBlueChristian.com.]
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