New Yorker Article: Joe Biden Slams Ex-Defense Secretary Gates (and more)
from the New Yorker:
____ After more than five years in the White House, Obama leans less visibly on Biden for foreign-policy advice than he once did, but Biden remains so closely identified with the Administration’s handling of the most vexing national-security problems that, when militants seized large parts of Iraq, in June, Mitt Romney told a mostly Republican audience that the “Obama-Biden-Hillary Clinton foreign policy” was to blame. The trials facing the President and the Vice-President, who are separated by nineteen years and a canyon in style, have brought them closer than many expected—not least of all themselves. John Marttila, one of Biden’s political advisers, told me, “Joe and Barack were having lunch, and Obama said to Biden, ‘You and I are becoming good friends! I find that very surprising.’ And Joe says, ‘You’re fucking surprised!’ ”
. . . Since entering the Administration, Biden has been a strident voice of skepticism about the use of American force. At times, that put him on the opposite side of debates from others in the Administration, including Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta, Obama’s first C.I.A. director. Biden opposed intervention in Libya (as did Defense Secretary Robert Gates), arguing that the fall of Muammar Qaddafi would result in chaos; Biden warned the President against the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. If it failed, Biden said later, Obama “would’ve been a one-term President.” Though Obama heeded Biden’s advice only sometimes, the two men adhered to a restrained foreign policy that “avoids errors,” as Obama put it to reporters in April. Asked to articulate an “Obama doctrine,” the President said, “You hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run.”
. . . In one of our interviews, Biden brought up the Gates book. “Gates gets upset because I questioned the military. Well, I believe now, believed then, that Washington and Jefferson were all right: war is too important to be left to generals. It is not their judgment to make! Theirs is to execute. So I think you’ve seen a President who is loyal and supportive of the military but realizes he’s the Commander-in-Chief.” At one point, I started to speak, but Biden interrupted. “I can hardly wait—either in a Presidential campaign or when I’m out of here—to debate Bob Gates. Oh, Jesus.”
I asked what he made of Gates’s specific criticisms. He called Gates “a really decent guy” and then unloaded on him: “Bob Gates is a Republican, with a view of foreign policy that is, in many fundamental ways, different from mine. Bob Gates has been wrong about everything! Bob Gates is wrong about the advice he gave President Reagan about how to deal with Gorbachev! That he wasn’t real. Thank God the President didn’t listen to him. Bob Gates was wrong about the Balkans. Bob Gates was wrong about the bombing. Bob Gates was wrong about the Vietnam War, for Christ’s sake. You go back, and everything in the last forty years, there’s nothing that I can think of, major fundamental decisions relative to foreign policy, that I can think he’s been right about!”
read more: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/biden-agenda
= new reply since forum marked as read
record of bad foreign decisions by BHO's hand-picked choice for SECDEF. Perhaps the moral of this saga is a Democratic president who picks a Republican SECDEF is, first and foremost, going to have a far-right agenda implemented in all policies and actions, i.e., assure the nation fosters belligerent right-wing nationalism assuring a grossly bloated MIC spending. 
which would certainly be the epitome of political cordiality, comity, and reaching across the aisle, especially in view of Gates' 40-year history of bad decisions in foreign policy matters per the Veep. 
Response to joshcryer (Reply #4)
