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csmonitor.com wrote:
Early leaks of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ highly anticipated memoir have yielded a slew of insider tidbits about the personalities and behind-the-scenes struggles of Presidents Bush and Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other top officials as they fought wars on two fronts.

Mr. Gates, who admits that he has a “pretty good poker face,” dishes about them all in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” due out next week.

Here are his top five revelations:

1. White House micromanagement

The Obama administration is “by far the most centralized and controlling” since the Nixon White House, Gates says.

He describes laboring mightily to “resist the magnetic pull exercised by the White House, especially in the Obama administration, to bring everything under its control and micromanagement.”

Indeed, he writes, the “controlling nature” of the White House staff “took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level.”

That said, in one of the sometimes contradictory pivots that the defense secretary to two presidents makes frequently in his book, Gates adds that he had “no problem with the White House driving policy” since “the bureaucracy at the State and Defense Departments rarely come up with big new ideas, so almost any meaningful change must be driven by the president and his National Security staff.”

Even Gates, admired by both sides of the political aisle, had trouble getting things accomplished. He writes that “despite everyone being ‘nice’ to me, getting anything consequential done was so damnably difficult – even in the midst of two wars.”

2. General's request for more troops

The 2009 request by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, for a large increase in troops for the war surprised the White House – and Gates.

“I believe the major reason the protracted, frustrating Afghanistan policy review held in the fall of 2009 created so much ill will was due to the fact it was forced on an otherwise controlling White House by the theater commander’s unexpected request for a large escalation of American involvement,” Gates writes.

The request from Gen. McChrystal “surprised the White House (and me) and provoked a debate that the White House didn’t want, especially when it became public.”

The request had the effect of making Obama and his advisers “incensed,” Gates argues, because the Pentagon – specifically the uniformed military – “had taken control of the policy process from them and threatened to run away with it.”

3. Impatience with posturing pols

Gates grew so disgusted with the posturing of lawmakers that he almost considered walking out of a congressional hearing – on more than one occasion.

Gates lambasts the “consistently adversarial, even inquisition-like treatment of executive-branch officials by too many members of Congress across the political spectrum.”

Gates also decries the – surprise – “single-minded parochial self-interest of so many members of Congress.”

The result, he says, was a “kangaroo-court environment in hearings, especially when the television cameras were present.”

Gates reserves special ire for the House Foreign Affairs Committee, describing the members as particularly “rude, nasty, and stupid.”

But he was no fan of the Senate, either. “I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets.”

4. Concern for fate of US troops

Gates struggled mightily with sending US troops to war, and his sense of foreboding about their fate “enveloped” him.

Gates may have had a good poker face, but he was also known among members of the Pentagon press corps for becoming misty-eyed, and for his voice catching slightly, when he was speaking with US troops.

In his memoir, he shares what was going through his mind as he struggled with the deaths of more than 3,800 American service members during his time on the job and as he wrote condolence letters to troops in the evenings, aided by the hometown newspaper clippings he asked his staff to compile in order to personalize the letters to the families.

As he returned to Iraq and Afghanistan again and again, on each visit, Gates writes, “I was enveloped by a sense of misery and danger and loss.”

He also reveals that he plans to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 60, where many of the Iraq and Afghanistan war dead are laid to rest. “The greatest honor possible,” he writes, “would be to rest among my heroes for all eternity.”

5. The right call on Afghanistan

Gates believes Obama made the right decision on the Afghanistan drawdown, and still believes America’s goals there are “within reach.”

He first admits that while “President Bush always detested the notion,” the war in Afghanistan was, “I believe, significantly compounded by the invasion of Iraq.” That’s because “resources and senior-level attention were [Gates’ italics] diverted from Afghanistan.”

There was another problem, too: For years, US goals in Afghanistan “were embarrassingly ambitious and historically naive compared with the meager human and financial resources committed to the task,” Gates argues.

These “embarrassingly ambitious” goals included “a properly-sized, competent Afghan national army and police, [and] a working democracy with at least a minimally effective and less corrupt central government.”

But prior to 2009, “the meager human and financial resources committed to the task” made these goals nearly impossible to accomplish, Gates writes.

“That’s why I continue to believe that the troop increase that Obama boldly approved in late 2009 was the right decision – providing sufficient forces to break the stalemate on the ground, rooting the Taliban out of their strongholds while training a much larger and more capable Afghan army.”

In order to do this, Gates notes, Obama “overruled the policy and domestic political concerns of his vice president and virtually all the senior White House staff.”