Recessional God of our fathers, known of old-- Lord of our far-flung battle line Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine-- Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies; The captains and the kings depart: Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget! Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe-- Such boasting as the Gentiles use Or lesser breeds without the law-- Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard-- All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding, calls not Thee to guard-- For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord! Rudyard Kipling 1897 |
| The photographs are of the life-size sculptures of United States veterans from the time of the Revolution to the present that form the Blue Ash Bicentennial Veterans Memorial, City of Blue Ash, Ohio. |
On 9/11/2008, the Northern Kentucky Interfaith Commission (NKIC) held its Second Annual Interfaith "PRAY FOR
PEACE RALLY" from 8:30 AM to 10:30 AM at the World Peace Bell in downtown Newport, Kentucky to remember
9/11/2001. Speakers included Paul Whalen, President NKIC; Rabbi Robert Reiner, Wise Temple; Cincinnati, Rev.
Vicki Garber, Gloria Dei Lutheran Church; Rev. Jerry Zehr, Florence Christian Church; Ahmer Sheriff, Islamic Center
of Greater Cincinnati; Rev. Steve Hecky, St. John's United Church of Christ, Suzanne Behle, practiioner SGI-USA
Nichiren Buddhism and Charleston Wang, member of Christ Church Cathedral, Cincinnati.
The 9-11 PRAY FOR PEACE RALLY at the World Peace Bell is the invention of Rev. Jim Bishop, Director of NKIC.
Shortly after he had taken office in 2006, a newspaper reporter called and asked what Interfaith was doing to
remember the events of 9/11/2001, He was saddened to report that the ecumenical body had made no plans other
than private prayers. Shortly after, as he was drinking coffee at White Castle across the street form the World
Peace Bell in downtown Newport, the thought came to him: "What better place to make a public witness for PEACE!"
The NKIC is a non-profit organization formed in 1969 by the merger of the Northern Kentucly Association of
Protestant Churches and the Cahtolic Information Center. It was initially dedicated to improving communications
between Protestants and Roman Catholics. But the ministry of this open-minded group soon broadened to
inlcude race relations and inter-faith workshops. It has never been the intention NKIC to duplicate the efforts of
other religious groups, but to facilitate their combined efforts.
PEACE RALLY" from 8:30 AM to 10:30 AM at the World Peace Bell in downtown Newport, Kentucky to remember
9/11/2001. Speakers included Paul Whalen, President NKIC; Rabbi Robert Reiner, Wise Temple; Cincinnati, Rev.
Vicki Garber, Gloria Dei Lutheran Church; Rev. Jerry Zehr, Florence Christian Church; Ahmer Sheriff, Islamic Center
of Greater Cincinnati; Rev. Steve Hecky, St. John's United Church of Christ, Suzanne Behle, practiioner SGI-USA
Nichiren Buddhism and Charleston Wang, member of Christ Church Cathedral, Cincinnati.
The 9-11 PRAY FOR PEACE RALLY at the World Peace Bell is the invention of Rev. Jim Bishop, Director of NKIC.
Shortly after he had taken office in 2006, a newspaper reporter called and asked what Interfaith was doing to
remember the events of 9/11/2001, He was saddened to report that the ecumenical body had made no plans other
than private prayers. Shortly after, as he was drinking coffee at White Castle across the street form the World
Peace Bell in downtown Newport, the thought came to him: "What better place to make a public witness for PEACE!"
The NKIC is a non-profit organization formed in 1969 by the merger of the Northern Kentucly Association of
Protestant Churches and the Cahtolic Information Center. It was initially dedicated to improving communications
between Protestants and Roman Catholics. But the ministry of this open-minded group soon broadened to
inlcude race relations and inter-faith workshops. It has never been the intention NKIC to duplicate the efforts of
other religious groups, but to facilitate their combined efforts.
THE ASIAN AMERICAN HOUR has gotten bigger - we are now on the air weekly on public radio WAIF-CINCINNATI 88.3 FM and our broadcast time has moved to prime-time THE ASIAN AMERICAN HOUR CONTINUES 13 YEARS ON THE AIR WITH WAIF 88.3 FM - Date of First Broadcast: 6/7/2001 THE ASIAN AMERICAN HOUR will continue to feature talk, and music, and other good things with a discernable slant towards Asian American affairs, immigration, and many other issues of interest to our community-at-large. THE ASIAN AMERICAN HOUR is produced and hosted by Charleston Wang with Mary Joan Reutter as co-host, together with our distinguished guests. So, tune in to THE ASIAN AMERICAN HOUR on WAIF-CINCINNATI 88.3 FM. every Monday 5-6 PM. Get the latest on the Asian American community in Cincinnati, the fast growing & mobile community in the Tri-state. After listening to the THE ASIAN AMERICAN HOUR, e-mail us direct feedback and thoughts by clicking here. If you or a friend wish to be a guest on THE ASIAN AMERICAN HOUR, please let us know. Tune in to THE ASIAN AMERICAN HOUR every Monday 5 - 6 PM on WAIF 88.3 FM Cincinnati on the air, or listen Via internet streaming audio from anywhere in the world by clicking here. |
From 2001-2009, Richard Bruce Cheney served as the 46th Vice President of the United States,
under George W. Bush. A few weeks ago, with help from daughter Liz, Dick published his
memoirs: “In My Time.” Those times also happen to be my time and I did not hesitate to buy a
hardcover First Edition and read it from cover to cover. It was time well spent for all 18 chapters
were written in clear, easy to read, no-nonsense prose. The first 8 chapters reminisce about the
beginning and include Mr. Cheney’s earlier political life. He has many kind words for President
Ford, and others including his former boss, Donald Rumsfeld who were instrumental in his rise in
politics from his youthful days as a drop-out from Yale. The second half of the book addresses his
time as a powerful, decision-making Vice President.
Embedded between the two halves are recollections on Iraq . In fact, it appears to me that Iraq is
foremost on Mr. Cheney’s mind and it is Iraq that he wishes to be clear on, at least by his own
reckoning of his time. He wants to be clear that he played a major role in the decision to invade
Iraq in March 2003 and that the reason is that Saddam Hussein “has continued its weapons of
mass destruction in defiance of the UN resolutions and restrictions,” and “has chemical and
biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions,” and “if left
unchecked, it [Iraq] probably will have a nuclear weapon in this decade.”[1] To this day and end,
Mr. Cheney links Iraq with 9/11 and terrorism a la Al Qaeda.
From that fateful Tuesday that is seen as an attempt by terrorists to "decapitate" the United
States, Mr. Cheney lives by the sentiment that 9/11/2001 changed America forever[2], and for
himself, it seems that 9/11 became all consuming, a diabolical attack on America for which in Mr.
Cheney’s playbook there can be one and only one response – the application of escalating
military force against Al Qaeda and everyone and everything that are suspected to have any link
to that terrorist outfit. His passion may best be summed up in his own words:
We are dealing here with evil people who dwell in the shadows, planning unimaginable
violence and destruction. We have no alternative but to meet the enemy where he dwells.
… We must and we will use every means at our disposal to ensure the freedom and security
of the American people.[3]
The first move by the rudely jolted Bush Administration was to attack Afghanistan (this is where
Osama bin Laden is) and next was Iraq. Like an injured giant, the former Secretary of Defense, in
pain and anger, enthusiastically lashes out against enemies he believes to be responsible for
9/11. Persons captured in these wars are be treated not as prisoners of war but with means
commensurate with the high value of what they know and hence the invention of rendition and
the enhanced interrogation.
As it turned out, his chagrin is directed not only against foreigners, but also against those in the
administration whom he perceived to stand in the way of his war policies. Perhaps first and
foremost is General Colin Powell and he had the satisfaction of seeing the Secretary of State
replaced by Condoleezza Rice in 2005. Later when President Bush signaled a move away from
the counsel of the vice president, especially on the question of North Korea’s nuclear weapons
program, criticism is levied on the new Secretary of State, including she being “utterly misleading
and totally divorced from what [she] was doing,” and “in the absence of an agreement, to pretend
to have one.”[4] On the broader front, Cheney also gives his impression of the internal crisis
over domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency and presents a fascinating narrative
of the struggle with John Ashcroft while the Attorney General lay sick in hospital with pancreatitis.
Perhaps, the ire of Mr. Cheney may be better understood by reference to the doctrine of the Axis
of Evil, a phrase first unveiled by President Bush in his State of the Union Address on January 29,
2002 and repeated many time thereafter (but never in the book). Bush designated Iran, Iraq and
North Korea as the Axis of Evil. During June 2007, Mr. Cheney had advocated the use of the U.S.
military to destroy a nuclear reactor that North Korea was helping Syria build at al-Kibar. As it
turned out, he was the “lone voice,” and the President decided to take the “diplomatic path.”[5]
Notwithstanding the Axis of Evil, the Bush Administration continued to pursue a diplomatic
solution against North Korea’s nuclear ambition; on June 26, 2008, Bush made an announcement
in the Rose Garden of his intent to take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terror. Mr.
Cheney wrote:
I was disappointed, and not just because I disagreed with the president. It was his call. But
the process and decision that followed had seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded
way I’d seen him make decisions in the past.[6]
There are other disappointments – the firing of Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, and later
of the Chair of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace, and closer to home yet, the refusal of Bush to
give a full pardon to Cheney’s advisor, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for his conviction in the leak of
the covert identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Perhaps Mr. Cheney also rues over the failure to
get Osama bin Laden, although he is gracious to compliment President Obama for finishing the
job.
Mr. Cheney closes his book with a cursory discussion of the financial debacle that confronted the
last days of the Bush Administration. His take on that disaster can be gleaned by his own obliging
words: “The reasons for the financial crisis of 2008 are likely to be long debated.” Mr. Cheney
clearly wishes to be remembered for his unequivocal contribution to the war on terror and not for
the terror, albeit mostly non-physical but no less debilitating, suffered by the American people by
the economic recession from which we are still recovering today. Nonetheless, on the home
front, Mr. Cheney desires to be remembered for his tie-breaking votes in the Senate, in his own
words: “My ability to cast those votes gave Americans the Bush tax cut they still enjoy as I write.”
[7]
As with all major contemporary events, history will the arbiter of the big picture, this to come to
pass not in our lifetimes. The policy of waging war against two Nation-states for the acts of a non-
state actor such as Al Qaeda and cutting of taxes under the knowledge of increased expenditures
from these wars; the legacy of detainee treatment at Guantanamo; on the domestic front: the
unpreparedness displayed in the face of Hurricane Katrina (maybe a lot of our National Guards
and their equipment were in Iraq), being caught unawares by the mortgage meltdown, these are
issues among many others that will be long debated. I suspect Mr. Cheney, who himself is a
great lover of history, will be remembered as a single-minded twentieth century American patriot
who started many things but finished few in a changing and more complex, multifaceted world
order of the twenty first.
Charleston C. K. Wang, September 21, 2011, Cincinnati , Ohio , USA.
___________________________________
[1] Cheney, “In My Time,” pp 391-392 quoting 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, 2011
Threshold Editions.
[2] "September 11 changed our world forever. We may not like it, but it is the world in which we live."
Id. at p393.
[3] Id. at p.343. This policy echoes the ancient Roman maxim of salus populi suprema lex esto.
[4] Id. at p.487.
[5] Id. at p.471-2. The issue became moot when Israeli F-15s bombed the facility on September 6, 2007.
[6] Id. at p.486.
[7] Id. at p.494.
under George W. Bush. A few weeks ago, with help from daughter Liz, Dick published his
memoirs: “In My Time.” Those times also happen to be my time and I did not hesitate to buy a
hardcover First Edition and read it from cover to cover. It was time well spent for all 18 chapters
were written in clear, easy to read, no-nonsense prose. The first 8 chapters reminisce about the
beginning and include Mr. Cheney’s earlier political life. He has many kind words for President
Ford, and others including his former boss, Donald Rumsfeld who were instrumental in his rise in
politics from his youthful days as a drop-out from Yale. The second half of the book addresses his
time as a powerful, decision-making Vice President.
Embedded between the two halves are recollections on Iraq . In fact, it appears to me that Iraq is
foremost on Mr. Cheney’s mind and it is Iraq that he wishes to be clear on, at least by his own
reckoning of his time. He wants to be clear that he played a major role in the decision to invade
Iraq in March 2003 and that the reason is that Saddam Hussein “has continued its weapons of
mass destruction in defiance of the UN resolutions and restrictions,” and “has chemical and
biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions,” and “if left
unchecked, it [Iraq] probably will have a nuclear weapon in this decade.”[1] To this day and end,
Mr. Cheney links Iraq with 9/11 and terrorism a la Al Qaeda.
From that fateful Tuesday that is seen as an attempt by terrorists to "decapitate" the United
States, Mr. Cheney lives by the sentiment that 9/11/2001 changed America forever[2], and for
himself, it seems that 9/11 became all consuming, a diabolical attack on America for which in Mr.
Cheney’s playbook there can be one and only one response – the application of escalating
military force against Al Qaeda and everyone and everything that are suspected to have any link
to that terrorist outfit. His passion may best be summed up in his own words:
We are dealing here with evil people who dwell in the shadows, planning unimaginable
violence and destruction. We have no alternative but to meet the enemy where he dwells.
… We must and we will use every means at our disposal to ensure the freedom and security
of the American people.[3]
The first move by the rudely jolted Bush Administration was to attack Afghanistan (this is where
Osama bin Laden is) and next was Iraq. Like an injured giant, the former Secretary of Defense, in
pain and anger, enthusiastically lashes out against enemies he believes to be responsible for
9/11. Persons captured in these wars are be treated not as prisoners of war but with means
commensurate with the high value of what they know and hence the invention of rendition and
the enhanced interrogation.
As it turned out, his chagrin is directed not only against foreigners, but also against those in the
administration whom he perceived to stand in the way of his war policies. Perhaps first and
foremost is General Colin Powell and he had the satisfaction of seeing the Secretary of State
replaced by Condoleezza Rice in 2005. Later when President Bush signaled a move away from
the counsel of the vice president, especially on the question of North Korea’s nuclear weapons
program, criticism is levied on the new Secretary of State, including she being “utterly misleading
and totally divorced from what [she] was doing,” and “in the absence of an agreement, to pretend
to have one.”[4] On the broader front, Cheney also gives his impression of the internal crisis
over domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency and presents a fascinating narrative
of the struggle with John Ashcroft while the Attorney General lay sick in hospital with pancreatitis.
Perhaps, the ire of Mr. Cheney may be better understood by reference to the doctrine of the Axis
of Evil, a phrase first unveiled by President Bush in his State of the Union Address on January 29,
2002 and repeated many time thereafter (but never in the book). Bush designated Iran, Iraq and
North Korea as the Axis of Evil. During June 2007, Mr. Cheney had advocated the use of the U.S.
military to destroy a nuclear reactor that North Korea was helping Syria build at al-Kibar. As it
turned out, he was the “lone voice,” and the President decided to take the “diplomatic path.”[5]
Notwithstanding the Axis of Evil, the Bush Administration continued to pursue a diplomatic
solution against North Korea’s nuclear ambition; on June 26, 2008, Bush made an announcement
in the Rose Garden of his intent to take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terror. Mr.
Cheney wrote:
I was disappointed, and not just because I disagreed with the president. It was his call. But
the process and decision that followed had seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded
way I’d seen him make decisions in the past.[6]
There are other disappointments – the firing of Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, and later
of the Chair of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace, and closer to home yet, the refusal of Bush to
give a full pardon to Cheney’s advisor, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for his conviction in the leak of
the covert identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Perhaps Mr. Cheney also rues over the failure to
get Osama bin Laden, although he is gracious to compliment President Obama for finishing the
job.
Mr. Cheney closes his book with a cursory discussion of the financial debacle that confronted the
last days of the Bush Administration. His take on that disaster can be gleaned by his own obliging
words: “The reasons for the financial crisis of 2008 are likely to be long debated.” Mr. Cheney
clearly wishes to be remembered for his unequivocal contribution to the war on terror and not for
the terror, albeit mostly non-physical but no less debilitating, suffered by the American people by
the economic recession from which we are still recovering today. Nonetheless, on the home
front, Mr. Cheney desires to be remembered for his tie-breaking votes in the Senate, in his own
words: “My ability to cast those votes gave Americans the Bush tax cut they still enjoy as I write.”
[7]
As with all major contemporary events, history will the arbiter of the big picture, this to come to
pass not in our lifetimes. The policy of waging war against two Nation-states for the acts of a non-
state actor such as Al Qaeda and cutting of taxes under the knowledge of increased expenditures
from these wars; the legacy of detainee treatment at Guantanamo; on the domestic front: the
unpreparedness displayed in the face of Hurricane Katrina (maybe a lot of our National Guards
and their equipment were in Iraq), being caught unawares by the mortgage meltdown, these are
issues among many others that will be long debated. I suspect Mr. Cheney, who himself is a
great lover of history, will be remembered as a single-minded twentieth century American patriot
who started many things but finished few in a changing and more complex, multifaceted world
order of the twenty first.
Charleston C. K. Wang, September 21, 2011, Cincinnati , Ohio , USA.
___________________________________
[1] Cheney, “In My Time,” pp 391-392 quoting 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, 2011
Threshold Editions.
[2] "September 11 changed our world forever. We may not like it, but it is the world in which we live."
Id. at p393.
[3] Id. at p.343. This policy echoes the ancient Roman maxim of salus populi suprema lex esto.
[4] Id. at p.487.
[5] Id. at p.471-2. The issue became moot when Israeli F-15s bombed the facility on September 6, 2007.
[6] Id. at p.486.
[7] Id. at p.494.
| REPRINTED From WANGNEWS September 2011 A GLIMPSE INTO Dick Cheney's “IN MY TIME” A Personal and Political Memoir A Book Review by Charleston C. K. Wang |
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| A Book Review by Charleston C. K. Wang "DUTY" Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Robert M. Gates |
From 2006-2011, Robert Michael Gates served as the 22nd Secretary of
Defense, and under two quite different Presidents: George W. Bush and
Barack Obama. Having the distinction of spanning a next to unbridgeable
partisan divide, Gates in 2014 shares with us his recollection of this feat.
In a phrase, albeit a cliché, it seems to be have been done by "blood,
sweat, and tears." The blood of the warriors killed and wounded in Iraq and
Afghanistan; the sweat of his own labors; and the tears he has often shed
for the casualties, of which Gates is not ashamed to belabor again and
again in his flowing memoirs of nearly 600 pages.
A formidable politician and thoughtful writer, Gates wishes to leave his
readers with an impression that he had greatness thrust upon him in that
he was never born great, but perhaps he also earned a little of it as well.
Accordingly, he spends little to no time recounting his early life (he was
born and raised in Wichita, Kansas), but opens his book with how content
he was as president of Texas A&M University and happy with academic life.
Towards the end of the Bush Administration, he was nominated to replace
Donald Rumsfeld as chief of Defense - primarily to salvage the war in Iraq
and win the one in Afghanistan. He was confirmed by a 95-2 vote of the
Senate, and was sworn to duty by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Accordingly, "Duty" is about "war," in reality two low intensity, asymmetric
conflicts involving blotted shades of counter-terror and/or counter
-insurgency, in far-away, very different lands and against peoples never
fully understood. Here and there, the reader sees a blip of Russia, China,
and other countries that have been prominent on the national security
radar. Herein is the irony of how Gates qualified for the job - his forte (like
that of his Bush administration colleague, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice) is Russia, i.e. bigtime cold war intelligence with the USSR as
adversary-in- chief. Vladimir Putin (and later Dmitry Medvedev), when
occasionally met, are well analyzed and even fathomed, but "Duty" is
unconvincing, mostly due to a lack of exposition, on how the author
switched from superpower CIA spymaster to queller of Al Qaeda and
professor of the Taliban. Granted Gates teaches quite a few insights
(mostly critical) into our friends, Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai, but not
once does he write about the minds nor the spirit of the enemy - alas these
nitty gritty sandals in the sand shall forever remain nameless, faceless
shadows in shadowy little, but long wars. In wars past, we called them
guerilla (with the Marx-Mao taint), but now these deadly warriors are better
known as terrorists, or more plainly, as jihadists (properly, mujahideen
whom the United States supported when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan).
The soft spot, and therefore, popular prowess of Gates is his tenderness
and attention given to the service men and women he oversaw. A former
2nd lieutenant in the Air Force, he is never inhibited to retell how he can be
overcome with emotion when meeting troops in the field and in hospitals.
Some months into the job, when news broke on inefficiencies at Walter
Reed Army Hospital, Gates did not hesitate to relieve both the Secretary
and Surgeon General of the Army./1/ This battle is not done because
proper care of the wounded persists as an issue to this day. Knowing that
roadside bombs (IEDs) exploding under vehicles were a major cause of
casualties, Gate pushed through the delivery of MRAP (mine resistant
ambush protected) vehicles to the troops. He also fought for greatly
enhanced ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) capabilities
including making available remote devices as means to reduce American
casualties./2/ However, the book is silent on the use of killer drones, a
weapon that has proliferated.
For actual direction of the fighting, Gates relies on his generals who must
bring results; he will support them as he did with the surge in Iraq (2007)
and again in Afghanistan (2009) but will fire those he thinks are not up to
the mission. While appreciative of war-fighting generals such as Stan
McChrystal who focused on protecting the population over seizing
terrain,/3/ Gates has taken a personal interest in minimizing civilian
casualties, going out of the way even to apologize when many civilians
were killed. While General McChrystal, ironically, lost his job for going
public with his disagreement on what it takes to fight the Taliban, Gates saw
his job as rising above the politics and to smooth out the sharp
maneuvering between the White House (especially the vice president, and
the National Security Staff -NSS) and the military, one that was becoming
more difficult as the over-riding issue became getting out of Afghanistan
with a credible claim to victory. He sincerely detests the political
grandstanding that occurs much too often up on Capitol Hill, usually at the
expense of the Executive Branch.
Gates, for the most part, while revealing quite a bit of the differing
viewpoints towards wrapping up the Afghan fight and of the strong
personalities who advance them, is appropriately impersonal, sticking to
the facts and rationale wherever he can, academician such as he is (he
holds a PhD in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University and
he is known as Yoda inside the White House). He is complimentary towards
the two Secretaries of State he worked with - Rice and Hillary Clinton. With
the latter, he goes beyond the perfunctory prerequisites - Gates exudes
admiration, noting "indeed, we would develop a very strong partnership, in
part because it turned out we agreed on almost every important issue."/4/
However, there is a hint of disappointment when "Hillary told the president
that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was
facing him in the Iowa primary...and went on to say, 'The Iraq surge
worked.'" /5/ The jury on Iraq and Afghanistan are out, but sadly, peace may
come only with a political solution in addition to the military surges - a call
that may be beyond the billet of a Secretary of Defense or that of a
President acting unilaterally, hubris notwithstanding.
Respecting the two bosses he served, space will only permit a few
highlights. One is that "Obama likely would not make a decision 'on the
spot,' as Bush had done so often, but would probably want to consult with
other advisors first," /6/ and "Obama was the most deliberative president I
worked for." /7/ (Gates was DCI under Bush 41 after Soviet troops had
quitted Afghanistan). To pull this thread one stitch further, Gates at the end
of his book bemoans that "the controlling nature of the Obama White House
and the NSS took micro-management and operational meddling to a new
level,"/8/ and rather significantly, the "White House was by far the most
centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost."/9/
I got the sense that Gates had a conflicted and vacillating love-hate attitude
towards his tenure as Secretary of Defense. Perhaps he felt unsatisfied,
angry, or even overwhelmed by the obliqueness of the wars. For a man
steeped in Russian history and tutored in big power, set-piece intrigue
against the Kremlin, I suspect as Secretary of Defense he was
under-whelmed by the overly politicized but nonetheless intense debates
over surges that involve the difference of half a handful of brigades,
whereas in the aftermath of WWII, cold war planners conceptualized battle
at the higher echelons of divisions, corps, and on up, formations which
thankfully were never engaged in combat directly with the Russians./10/
Perhaps, his true longing was to be Secretary of State who is charged with
resolving disputes diplomatically without resort to arms. Nevertheless,
Gates who displays some pride in his ability to put forth a poker face, is
consistently gracious towards his counterparts in that Department.
Fortunately, he did have a few occasions to rub shoulders with his foreign
peers (and even heads of state) and these are usually during routine pro
forma conferences which lack real issues (the most intense perhaps was
the invasion of Georgia by Russia in 2008) which Gates found to be
mundane or even boring.
And then there were the annual fights within the White House, and worse,
up the hill with Congress over the defense budget during a very severe
recession. While Gates is generally unpretentious and quite willing to
admit to a number of mistakes, the Budget is one topic that he shows
severe denial, for he proclaims:
I believed Defense was not a major factor in the size of either the
national debt or the annual deficit [sic!] and that developments in
the rest of the world provided ample reason to sustain and enhance
our military capabilities: if we reduced our budget, we should be
allowed to do so slowly and with a wary eye on the global security
environment./11/
In his defense, his heart was with the troops on the ground. He wanted the
best for them, although the wars he oversaw did not involve the really big
ticket items that the American military has come to love and want.
For a last comment, it was during Gates' watch that the final tactical
operation was launched against the mastermind of 9/11, who through mostly
a combination of serendipity and good casework, had been located
unawares, holed up in a gated compound in a military university town in
Pakistan, instead of Afghanistan. Having pointed this out, I will leave it to
the interested reader to find out what Robert M. Gates had to say about
bringing closure to this burning issue. C'est la guerre in a time as we are
living it.
Charleston C. K. Wang, July 4, 2014 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
__________________________
/1/ Gates, "Duty," pp109-114. /2/ Id. at pp119-126 passim. /3/ Id. at pp355. /4/ Id. at p283,
/5/ Id. at p376. /6/ Id. at p324. /7/ Id. at p299. /8/ Id. at p587. /9/ Id. at p586. /10/ See, Robert M.
Gates "From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story by Five Presidents and How they Won
the Cold War. " 1996 Simon & Schuster. /11/ Id. at p58.
Defense, and under two quite different Presidents: George W. Bush and
Barack Obama. Having the distinction of spanning a next to unbridgeable
partisan divide, Gates in 2014 shares with us his recollection of this feat.
In a phrase, albeit a cliché, it seems to be have been done by "blood,
sweat, and tears." The blood of the warriors killed and wounded in Iraq and
Afghanistan; the sweat of his own labors; and the tears he has often shed
for the casualties, of which Gates is not ashamed to belabor again and
again in his flowing memoirs of nearly 600 pages.
A formidable politician and thoughtful writer, Gates wishes to leave his
readers with an impression that he had greatness thrust upon him in that
he was never born great, but perhaps he also earned a little of it as well.
Accordingly, he spends little to no time recounting his early life (he was
born and raised in Wichita, Kansas), but opens his book with how content
he was as president of Texas A&M University and happy with academic life.
Towards the end of the Bush Administration, he was nominated to replace
Donald Rumsfeld as chief of Defense - primarily to salvage the war in Iraq
and win the one in Afghanistan. He was confirmed by a 95-2 vote of the
Senate, and was sworn to duty by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Accordingly, "Duty" is about "war," in reality two low intensity, asymmetric
conflicts involving blotted shades of counter-terror and/or counter
-insurgency, in far-away, very different lands and against peoples never
fully understood. Here and there, the reader sees a blip of Russia, China,
and other countries that have been prominent on the national security
radar. Herein is the irony of how Gates qualified for the job - his forte (like
that of his Bush administration colleague, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice) is Russia, i.e. bigtime cold war intelligence with the USSR as
adversary-in- chief. Vladimir Putin (and later Dmitry Medvedev), when
occasionally met, are well analyzed and even fathomed, but "Duty" is
unconvincing, mostly due to a lack of exposition, on how the author
switched from superpower CIA spymaster to queller of Al Qaeda and
professor of the Taliban. Granted Gates teaches quite a few insights
(mostly critical) into our friends, Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai, but not
once does he write about the minds nor the spirit of the enemy - alas these
nitty gritty sandals in the sand shall forever remain nameless, faceless
shadows in shadowy little, but long wars. In wars past, we called them
guerilla (with the Marx-Mao taint), but now these deadly warriors are better
known as terrorists, or more plainly, as jihadists (properly, mujahideen
whom the United States supported when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan).
The soft spot, and therefore, popular prowess of Gates is his tenderness
and attention given to the service men and women he oversaw. A former
2nd lieutenant in the Air Force, he is never inhibited to retell how he can be
overcome with emotion when meeting troops in the field and in hospitals.
Some months into the job, when news broke on inefficiencies at Walter
Reed Army Hospital, Gates did not hesitate to relieve both the Secretary
and Surgeon General of the Army./1/ This battle is not done because
proper care of the wounded persists as an issue to this day. Knowing that
roadside bombs (IEDs) exploding under vehicles were a major cause of
casualties, Gate pushed through the delivery of MRAP (mine resistant
ambush protected) vehicles to the troops. He also fought for greatly
enhanced ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) capabilities
including making available remote devices as means to reduce American
casualties./2/ However, the book is silent on the use of killer drones, a
weapon that has proliferated.
For actual direction of the fighting, Gates relies on his generals who must
bring results; he will support them as he did with the surge in Iraq (2007)
and again in Afghanistan (2009) but will fire those he thinks are not up to
the mission. While appreciative of war-fighting generals such as Stan
McChrystal who focused on protecting the population over seizing
terrain,/3/ Gates has taken a personal interest in minimizing civilian
casualties, going out of the way even to apologize when many civilians
were killed. While General McChrystal, ironically, lost his job for going
public with his disagreement on what it takes to fight the Taliban, Gates saw
his job as rising above the politics and to smooth out the sharp
maneuvering between the White House (especially the vice president, and
the National Security Staff -NSS) and the military, one that was becoming
more difficult as the over-riding issue became getting out of Afghanistan
with a credible claim to victory. He sincerely detests the political
grandstanding that occurs much too often up on Capitol Hill, usually at the
expense of the Executive Branch.
Gates, for the most part, while revealing quite a bit of the differing
viewpoints towards wrapping up the Afghan fight and of the strong
personalities who advance them, is appropriately impersonal, sticking to
the facts and rationale wherever he can, academician such as he is (he
holds a PhD in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University and
he is known as Yoda inside the White House). He is complimentary towards
the two Secretaries of State he worked with - Rice and Hillary Clinton. With
the latter, he goes beyond the perfunctory prerequisites - Gates exudes
admiration, noting "indeed, we would develop a very strong partnership, in
part because it turned out we agreed on almost every important issue."/4/
However, there is a hint of disappointment when "Hillary told the president
that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was
facing him in the Iowa primary...and went on to say, 'The Iraq surge
worked.'" /5/ The jury on Iraq and Afghanistan are out, but sadly, peace may
come only with a political solution in addition to the military surges - a call
that may be beyond the billet of a Secretary of Defense or that of a
President acting unilaterally, hubris notwithstanding.
Respecting the two bosses he served, space will only permit a few
highlights. One is that "Obama likely would not make a decision 'on the
spot,' as Bush had done so often, but would probably want to consult with
other advisors first," /6/ and "Obama was the most deliberative president I
worked for." /7/ (Gates was DCI under Bush 41 after Soviet troops had
quitted Afghanistan). To pull this thread one stitch further, Gates at the end
of his book bemoans that "the controlling nature of the Obama White House
and the NSS took micro-management and operational meddling to a new
level,"/8/ and rather significantly, the "White House was by far the most
centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost."/9/
I got the sense that Gates had a conflicted and vacillating love-hate attitude
towards his tenure as Secretary of Defense. Perhaps he felt unsatisfied,
angry, or even overwhelmed by the obliqueness of the wars. For a man
steeped in Russian history and tutored in big power, set-piece intrigue
against the Kremlin, I suspect as Secretary of Defense he was
under-whelmed by the overly politicized but nonetheless intense debates
over surges that involve the difference of half a handful of brigades,
whereas in the aftermath of WWII, cold war planners conceptualized battle
at the higher echelons of divisions, corps, and on up, formations which
thankfully were never engaged in combat directly with the Russians./10/
Perhaps, his true longing was to be Secretary of State who is charged with
resolving disputes diplomatically without resort to arms. Nevertheless,
Gates who displays some pride in his ability to put forth a poker face, is
consistently gracious towards his counterparts in that Department.
Fortunately, he did have a few occasions to rub shoulders with his foreign
peers (and even heads of state) and these are usually during routine pro
forma conferences which lack real issues (the most intense perhaps was
the invasion of Georgia by Russia in 2008) which Gates found to be
mundane or even boring.
And then there were the annual fights within the White House, and worse,
up the hill with Congress over the defense budget during a very severe
recession. While Gates is generally unpretentious and quite willing to
admit to a number of mistakes, the Budget is one topic that he shows
severe denial, for he proclaims:
I believed Defense was not a major factor in the size of either the
national debt or the annual deficit [sic!] and that developments in
the rest of the world provided ample reason to sustain and enhance
our military capabilities: if we reduced our budget, we should be
allowed to do so slowly and with a wary eye on the global security
environment./11/
In his defense, his heart was with the troops on the ground. He wanted the
best for them, although the wars he oversaw did not involve the really big
ticket items that the American military has come to love and want.
For a last comment, it was during Gates' watch that the final tactical
operation was launched against the mastermind of 9/11, who through mostly
a combination of serendipity and good casework, had been located
unawares, holed up in a gated compound in a military university town in
Pakistan, instead of Afghanistan. Having pointed this out, I will leave it to
the interested reader to find out what Robert M. Gates had to say about
bringing closure to this burning issue. C'est la guerre in a time as we are
living it.
Charleston C. K. Wang, July 4, 2014 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
__________________________
/1/ Gates, "Duty," pp109-114. /2/ Id. at pp119-126 passim. /3/ Id. at pp355. /4/ Id. at p283,
/5/ Id. at p376. /6/ Id. at p324. /7/ Id. at p299. /8/ Id. at p587. /9/ Id. at p586. /10/ See, Robert M.
Gates "From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story by Five Presidents and How they Won
the Cold War. " 1996 Simon & Schuster. /11/ Id. at p58.
| A HAPPY COLORFUL JULY 4, 2014 IN THE CITY OF MONTGOMERY, OHIO |
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