Gates inherits challenges at Pentagon
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer
Fri Nov 10, 1:20 AM ET

President Bush's choice to head the Pentagon will inherit an unpopular war in Iraq, a straining military mobilized in hot spots around the world and a budget that commanders complain has underfunded their combat needs.

Robert Gates' biggest hurdle will doubtless be meeting the high expectations for an Iraq exit strategy under pressure from next year's Democratic-controlled Congress and a war-weary American public.

Given Bush's suggestion this week that his new Cabinet member, whose Senate confirmation is all but assured, would be a force for change, Gates will be expected to do what the outgoing secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, could not: Figure out how to bring home substantial numbers of troops from Iraq in short order, without surrendering the country to a new insurgency or triggering all-out civil war.

"If anybody had a silver bullet answer for this, the president and the previous secretary would have done it, they would have loved to get the troops out early," said retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, former deputy commander of the U.S. Central Command during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

As a member of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel that has been asked to help chart a new course in the war, Gates has been immersed in the issue for months. That group is expected to issue its recommendations as early as next month, and they are eagerly awaited by Bush and members of Congress.

Some military leaders have quietly suggested there are ways to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq by restructuring the way coalition forces are being used.

A smaller U.S. presence, they have argued, could lessen tensions and reduce the violence and still provide needed training to the Iraqis. Gates will also have to decide whether to reduce the combat role of American forces there and instead use them more as advisers and as backups in emergencies.

Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., said he plans to ask Gates what he thinks about Democrats' proposal to begin bringing home some troops immediately to try to pressure the Iraqi government to take more responsibility.

"There's a lot of other questions that need to be asked about Iraq, having to do with the militias, having to do with the military situation in Iraq, having to do with the control of Anbar Province," an area plagued by insurgents, Levin said.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., warned not to expect any quick recommendations for change, given that Gates "probably hasn't had as much time as he would like."

Sen. Jack Reed (news, bio, voting record), D-R.I., said Gates will have to grapple with North Korea's and Iran's nuclear programs, a military that is also stretched in Afghanistan, East Asia and elsewhere, and how to fund the billions needed to fix military equipment.

"There are a host of issues that involve not only the mission in Iraq, but also the resources to accomplish that mission," Reed said.

Gates faces decisions about whether to retain top military commanders such as Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, or Gen. John Abizaid, who heads Central Command, which oversees U.S. forces in the Mideast.

Within the Pentagon, he also has to choose whether to keep officials who have been close to Rumsfeld such as Stephen A. Cambone, the undersecretary for intelligence.

Gates will be faced almost immediately with decisions about the Defense Department's $470 billion budget, including concerns that there is not enough money for the Army and Marines to replace equipment destroyed or worn out in Iraq. The National Guard alone has said it needs as much as double the $30 billion earmarked for it over the next five years.

Analysts questioned whether Gates will have the force of personality and military understanding to deal with the Pentagon's commanding generals and put their recommendations and demands in perspective.

Dan Goure, military analyst at the Lexington Institute, said the generals could claim to be victims and tell Gates that Rumsfeld didn't give them the troops and equipment needed to win the war and modernize the military. And they will ask Gates to correct that.

"They will come with IOUs that stagger the imagination," Goure said.

Gates' two decades with the CIA, including his 1991-1993 stint as director, may bring another benefit: a recognition of how intelligence agencies must work together.

"He should have a pretty good understanding and sensitivity and feel for the requirements of unconventional warfare, which the military is only lately beginning to really get its arms around," said Thomas Donnelly, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Some suggested that one of the best things going for Gates may be that he's not Rumsfeld — a man known for his demanding and often combative style.

"The only real negative that I see, is that he's not an expert on military issues," said Michele Flournoy, a senior Pentagon official in the Clinton administration. "But he has a reputation for being a good listener and a quick learner."

___

On the Net:

Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

___

Associated Press writer Anne Plummer Flaherty contributed to this report.



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Analysis: Iraq debate transformed
By Roger Hardy
BBC Middle East analyst


Suddenly, the talk is no longer of victory and democracy in Iraq, but of failure and withdrawal.


The ambitions of the US led-war have now been scaled back

The success of the Democrats in the US mid-term elections, and the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as Defence Secretary, reflect a new level of dissatisfaction with policy on Iraq.

The debate about what the right strategy should be has intensified in the two countries with the most troops there - the United States and Britain.

Unease over the situation in Iraq has been building for some time. But in the run-up to US elections it exploded into public view.

James Baker, the former US Secretary of State, began to drop hints as to what his high-powered Iraq Study Group might recommend once the elections were out of the way.

He implied that stability was a more realistic goal than democracy. He apparently favours co-opting Iraq's neighbours - including Iran and Syria.

His bipartisan group is expected to issue its report in early December.

News realism

President Bush himself seemed to get the message. He was open to new ideas, he insisted. He was not stubbornly clinging to the mantra of "stay the course".

The debate has been heated, at times over-heated.

There is no easy exit strategy... Precipitate withdrawal would risk plunging Iraq into even worse violence... Partition, which now has some powerful advocates in Washington and elsewhere, might lead to even worse ethnic and sectarian cleansing


Several mainstream figures such as the veteran Middle East trouble-shooter Dennis Ross have come out in favour of a phased withdrawal.

This has drawn growls of disapproval from the neo-conservatives - the radical Republicans who had lobbied hard for the Iraq war and now find themselves on the defensive.

One neo-con, Marc Reul Gerecht, has attacked what he sees as the defeatism of the Democrats - and of centrists like Mr Baker.

Another, Eliot Cohen, has said it may be necessary to forget about Iraqi democracy and accept the creation of a "junta of military modernisers".

Everywhere, it seems, expectations are being revised and old slogans discarded.

Erosion of support

The debate is under way in London as well as Washington.

In mid-October Britain's most senior army commander, Sir Richard Dannatt, created a stir by saying British troops were making the situation worse and should be withdrawn soon.


Rumsfeld's departure is a sign of an expected change of direction

In both countries, there has been a significant erosion of support for the war.

But although the debate has shifted markedly, there is no easy exit strategy.

Precipitate withdrawal would risk plunging Iraq into even worse violence and fragmentation.

Partition, which now has some powerful advocates in Washington and elsewhere, might lead to even worse ethnic and sectarian cleansing.

Ultimatum?


Two elements are of crucial importance.

One is to find a more successful way of getting Iraqi leaders to take the political and security reins.

The general view is that they have performed poorly on both counts.

But would an ultimatum - get your act together or we will pull out - actually work?

The other element is to get Iraq's neighbours to be more helpful - or at least less unhelpful.

They could, if they chose, help to stem the flow of arms and money and militants to the Iraqi insurgency.

James Baker and his panel of experts are likely to have things to say about both of these issues.

The American people have voted for change.

But as Mr Baker has warned, there is no magic bullet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6135442.stm

Understanding Gates
It's Not as Simple as Father's Team vs. Son's

By James Mann
Friday, November 10, 2006; Page A31

In the early months of 1989, the overriding foreign policy issue for the new George H.W. Bush administration was how to deal with Mikhail Gorbachev. Did the Soviet leader represent fundamental change, or was he merely a new face for the same old policies?

The administration was divided. James Baker, the secretary of state, wanted to test out Gorbachev. The anti-Gorbachev hawks were led by Robert M. Gates, the deputy national security adviser. Gates's principal ally was then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.



Robert Gates and President George H.W. Bush in 1991. (By Doug Mills -- Associated Press)

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Baker vs. Gates/Cheney: That alignment should serve as a warning to those who view Wednesday's appointment of Robert M. Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld as representing the triumph of Bush the Father's administration over Bush the Son's. Any such analysis is far too simplistic. Gates's nomination unquestionably stands for one proposition: a long-awaited recognition that the administration's war in Iraq has been a disaster. But the broader interpretation of the appointment as representing a victory of Bush 41 over Bush 43 -- or of one school of thought over another -- breaks down when you look at Gates's background and the history of the 1980s and early '90s.

For one thing, that analysis depends on a selective view of the Bush 41 administration. Yes, it included Gates; then-national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, a determined opponent of the current Iraq war; and Baker, who is now head of a bipartisan group searching for a new Iraq policy. But Vice President Cheney was a charter member of the Bush 41 administration. So were Cheney's former aide Stephen Hadley, the current national security adviser, and Condoleezza Rice -- who have been among the principal architects of the war in Iraq.

Moreover, as that 1989 debate over Gorbachev illustrates, the Bush 41 foreign policy team was hardly united. Its members bickered about the Soviet Union, about China, about the Middle East. One of the few things it was in complete harmony on was the belief that American troops shouldn't go on to Baghdad at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. At the time, everyone thought that would be a bad idea, including Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of defense.

Well, then, does Wednesday's appointment of Gates represent a change of philosophy, the triumph of realism over neoconservatism? That doesn't quite work, either. Rumsfeld was never a neoconservative; he was an obstreperous contrarian, committed not to putting forward any particular philosophy but to aggressively challenging whatever ideas his bureaucratic opponents and critics put forward.

Gates is being characterized as a "realist," but his record is more complex than that, too. He was an ardent Cold War hawk who did not shrink from moral judgments. "The Soviet Union was an evil empire," Gates wrote in the concluding chapter of his 1996 memoir, "From the Shadows." Gates believed he was simply being skeptical when he insisted that Gorbachev was just another Soviet leader. But others in Washington saw this stand as ideological in nature. Former secretary of state George P. Shultz complained that Gates and the CIA had repeatedly tailored intelligence to fit the policy interests they favored. "You deal out intelligence as you deem appropriate," Shultz complained to Gates in one icy confrontation he recounted in his own memoir. "I feel an effort is made to manipulate me by the selection of materials you send my way."

On America's role in the world and the use of military force, it is hard to detect in Gates's record many far-reaching, principled differences with the present administration. He was deputy national security adviser when the Bush 41 administration dispatched American troops to Panama to overthrow Manuel Noriega. That intervention was, at the time, the largest U.S. military action since Vietnam, and in its essentials -- that is, the use of force to replace a dictator -- it was the closest single precedent one can find for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On the defense budget, it was the Bush 41 administration that decided there should be no significant "peace dividend" after the Cold War.

So what does the appointment of Gates to succeed Rumsfeld really represent? The Panama example provides one guide: It succeeded, unlike the intervention in Iraq. Whatever their underlying philosophy, American leaders and officials are above all accountable for knowing what's going to work and what isn't; for understanding whether the United States has the ability -- militarily, politically, economically, diplomatically -- to accomplish something before setting out on a venture, particularly one that could cost many thousands of American lives.

Rumsfeld was the living personification of the error on Iraq, which America will be paying for over many years. But of course the ultimate responsibility lies with the president of the United States, the person who once said, "I'm the decider." Now, he's decided, without saying so, that his original judgment was wrong.

James Mann is author in residence at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and the author of "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6110901774.html

UNDERSTANDING GATES: IT'S NOT AS SIMPLE AS FATHER'S TEAM VS. SON'S - JAMES MANN (WASHINGTON POST, NOVEMBER 10): Now, Bush has decided, without saying so, that his original judgment on Iraq was wrong.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6110901774.html

New man at the Pentagon puts his hand on Baghdad exit door
Sarah Baxter in Washington



IF Robert Gates had any illusions about the scale of violence in Iraq, they were dispelled when he flew into Baghdad last summer.
Gates, who was named US defence secretary last week by President George W Bush, had gone to observe conditions at first hand as a member of the Iraq Study Group, the independent commission co-chaired by James Baker, the former secretary of state. It was a terrifying experience.


As the aircraft entered Iraqi airspace, the team donned helmets and flak jackets. “You’re dropping 10,000ft and you’ve got to avoid missiles. As soon as you land, you’re flown by helicopter to the green (international) zone. There were attack helicopters all around us firing flares to make sure that the heat-seeking missiles didn’t hit us,” said one of his travelling companions.

Once there, Gates met the key players from the American ambassador and US generals to Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s beleaguered prime minister. A close associate described him as “distraught over the incompetence of how the Iraq operation had been run”.

He went on to ask sharp questions, including whether more American troops were needed to shore up the Iraqi capital.

“Gates is open to a lot of suggestions. He hasn’t got a closed mind,” the source added.

Donald Rumsfeld, his predecessor at the Pentagon, has never been regarded as a listener. After the pasting Bush received in the midterm elections last week, it was clear his tough-minded defence secretary was going to take the fall for a war that has claimed the lives of 2,846 American soldiers. But the pressure is on Gates to do more than canvass opinions. Will he be able to take the hard decisions necessary to chart a new course in Iraq?

Bush claimed last week that he was “open to any ideas” on how to win in Iraq. He is to meet members of the Baker commission tomorrow to discuss their thinking. On Tuesday Tony Blair will give evidence to them by video link. He will urge the Bush administration to open talks with Iran and Syria on a Middle East settlement.

Gates will not take much persuading from Blair, having argued for dialogue with Iran two years ago. “He comes from the old Bush 1 school that it’s important to talk to your enemies, but we can’t underestimate the role the president plays in all this and he’s been pretty intransigent,” said a colleague on the Iraq Study Group.

The irony is that Gates will no longer participate in the Baker group’s meetings as he is in purdah until he can be confirmed in his post by the Senate, probably next month. Around the same time, the Baker group is due to finalise its report.

A new direction for Iraq cannot come too soon. According to the Iraqi health minister, 150,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion. The Baghdad morgue received 1,600 victims of violent deaths last month, compared with 1,100 in September. Two bombs in one of the capital’s crowded markets killed eight people yesterday.

Inside the Pentagon, some old hands are wondering whether the coolly analytical Gates, a former head of the CIA and friend of the first President George Bush, is enough of a risk-taker to turn the situation around.

“He tacks right to the middle,” said a defence source. “He’s the guy who can hold the reins, get confirmed and get through the next two years without the Democrats cutting off the money.” But can he produce an effective plan for victory? The Democrats are already laying plans for a withdrawal timetable now that they control Congress. Senator Carl Levin, prospective chairman of the Senate armed services committee, said the Iraqis needed to know there was “no open-ended commitment”.

Rumsfeld had never been enthusiastic about nation-building in Iraq. He had wanted a quick shock and awe war, followed by an American exit. “I will say this,” he told students in New York the day after his resignation, “it is very clear that the major combat operations were an enormous success. It is clear that, in phase two of this, it has not been going well enough or fast enough.”

The prospect of a Democrat victory in the mid-term elections had been bothering Rumsfeld for weeks. He had first offered his resignation over the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib but the president had brushed it off. About a fortnight ago, he told Bush he was prepared to quit in the event of a Republican defeat.

“If the Democrats had only won the House of Representatives, it is possible he might have stayed on,” said a senior defence source. “But if they also won the Senate, he was determined to go. He thought that if the Democrats ran the Senate armed forces committee as well as the House, he would never get any business done.”

In September, Rumsfeld underwent surgery on his left shoulder for an old sports injury. The operation was successful but left him in pain. At 74, the multi-millionaire Rumsfeld decided it was not worth fighting congressional investigations for years.

In any case, Bush had been toying with the idea of dumping his defence secretary for months, although he told reporters on the campaign trail that he would stay on. Many Republican supporters are furious that Rumsfeld was not sacked before the elections. “Rumsfeld is a distraction,” said one senior military officer. “What did he do to help the president?” It was not only the elections that prompted his departure. A sign that he was losing the confidence of his generals came a few weeks ago when James Jones, the Nato commander, was touted as a possible replacement for General John Abizaid at Centcom, the top Middle East command post.

Jones is said to have asked Rumsfeld whether the Iraq strategy would change. When he was told it would not, he withdrew his name from consideration.

Bush had hoped to let Rumsfeld become the longest-serving defence secretary. On December 28, he was due to beat a record set by Robert McNamara in the Vietnam era. He will not now overtake McNamara unless Gates’s selection is held up by Congress.

Andrew Card, Bush’s former chief of staff, twice tried to get rid of Rumsfeld, according to Bob Woodward’s book, State of Denial. His top choice to replace him was Baker.

Baker let slip recently that he regularly dropped by the White House to discuss “policy and personnel”. A senior White House official confirmed Baker had praised Gates to the president. Gates is being described by critics on the right as Baker’s “surrogate”.

Potential areas of agreement are already emerging from deliberations at the Pentagon, which is conducting a secret review of strategy, and the Iraq Study Group. Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said on Friday: “We need to give ourselves a good honest scrub about what is working and what is not.”

Once Gates becomes defence secretary, the two reviews will effectively be merged, giving him the chance to cherry pick the best recommendations from both.

According to sources close to the Baker commission, Gates is believed to share the consensus view that the Iraqis need to be coaxed into a constitutional settlement, which would lead to greater devolution for Sunnis, Kurds and Shi’ites and a share in oil wealth for the embittered Sunni minority.

“You’ve got to find the sweet spot,” said Andrew Krepinevich, a Pentagon adviser and director of the Center for Strategy and Budgetary Assessments, a think tank. “If you give them too much autonomy, you effectively have independent states.” Bush has already ruled out moves to partition Iraq.

Gates is thought to favour massing US forces in Baghdad, where winning control of the streets is considered vital for the survival of the Maliki government, but US generals have told him that it may be better to increase the number of Iraqi units.

If more US forces are deployed, Gates will have to order units to pull back from the northern Kurdish regions to avoid sending more troops, which would be opposed by congressional Democrats. He will also seek to embed greater numbers of American officers in the Iraqi security forces.

Troop reductions will be linked to political and military “benchmarks”, leaving a rapid reaction force behind to cope with any rise in insurgency. Ultimately US forces could be redeployed to other countries, such as Kuwait. But Gates is understood to share the view of US generals that it could take 12-18 months to bring troop levels below 100,000.

While Gates backs Britain’s proposal for talks with Iran, Syria and other regional powers, it would require a volte-face at the White House. “We’re certainly capable of being a bridge, but the Bush administration would have to change its tone a lot,” said a British diplomatic source.

Sir Nigel Scheinwald, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, paid a secret visit to President Bashar al-Assad last month, but the reaction of the Americans to the initiative was disappointing. “I was surprised they didn’t go towards meeting us halfway,” the source added. “Their reaction was vitriolic: it was, ‘We’ll never speak to these people’.”

The extent of any Iranian co-operation in a grand regional bargain is also open to question. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hailed Bush’s defeat in the mid-term elections last week as a victory for Tehran. He has rightly concluded that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is off the agenda.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, is certain to discuss Iran and the Middle East peace process when he meets Bush tomorrow, but seems as unlikely as Bush to order an attack on Tehran, despite his deputy defence minister’s sabre-rattling talk last week about the possible need for pre-emptive strikes as a “last resort”.

The chief hawk in the cabinet, vice-president Dick Cheney, has become a diminished figure after Rumsfeld’s exit. “He’s not isolated because he’s right down the hall,” said Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard, a conservative journal, and author of Rebel in Chief, a biography of Bush. “But one of his best friends and mentors is leaving, and that won’t help his influence.”

For a foreign policy realist such as Gates, perhaps the best hope for progress in Iraq is likely to come from the Iraqis themselves. Saddam’s call for “all Iraqis, Arabs and Kurds, to forgive, reconcile and shake hands” after he was sentenced to hang appears to be having some effect, according to defence sources.

Last week, Saddam’s former second-in-command, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a rebel leader with a $10m bounty on his head, called on Sunnis to stop fighting. At the same time, the Maliki government promised that all but the most senior officials — about 1,500 — from Saddam’s Ba’athist regime could return to work or receive their pensions.

As Rumsfeld claimed, the future of Iraq depends on a political rather than a military solution. Gates might be able to persuade Bush to be more flexible.

In this, he could learn from the British, who take an elastic view of such matters. According to a senior diplomatic source, “Baker is trying to walk away from the idealist, neoconservative approach to democracy . . . We say democracy is what the people of a country understand it to be.” oPresident Putin held talks with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, in Moscow yesterday in an attempt to freeze Iran’s uranium-enrichment programme.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2449835,00.html

Out with the Old, In With the Old
The Revolving Gates at the Pentagon
By Col. DAN SMITH

The change in control of both houses of Congress was not the only bad news for George Bush. The day after the election, he announced the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense and the nomination of Robert Gates as his successor.

Coming just a week after the president told reporters that he wanted Rumsfeld to stay for the duration of his tenure in the White House, the change in the Pentagon's civilian head caught many by surprise. There was also a lot of relief. In the European parliament, 200 socialist deputies hailed "the beginning of the end of a six-year nightmare for the world."

Not necessarily. Changing personalities at the Pentagon does not necessarily mean that policy will change. In fact, Bush stated flatly that the goal is still "victory"-an Iraq that can defend itself from terrorists and the meddling of it neighbors, provide basic services for its people, and is fully integrated into the world economy.

So the question really is whether Robert Gates can offer a different direction-and whether Bush will listen?

Confirming Gates

First, however, the Senate will hold confirmation hearings for Gates, who currently is president of Texas A&M. Gates, no stranger to Washington, knows the process well. In 1966, after two years in the Air Force working with intercontinental ballistic missiles, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a Soviet analyst. He rose rapidly through the ranks until President Reagan appointed him deputy director of the CIA in 1986. One year later, he faced confirmation hearings to replace William Casey as director of the CIA.

In the meantime, however, the Iran-Contra scandal had blown wide open. A special prosecutor was investigating grounds for criminal indictments and Congress was holding extensive hearings. Many in Congress and in the nation were skeptical of Gates' claim that, until very late in the action, he was largely "out of the loop." The sale of weapons and spare parts to Iran and the diversion of the proceeds to the Nicaraguan Contras was a major operation. Even if directly orchestrated by Casey and Oliver North of the National Security Council staff, Gates most likely knew something of the scheme. That Casey and the CIA were directly aiding and abetting the Contras to overthrow the Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega only fueled suspicions.

Facing an uphill confirmation battle, Gates withdrew his name. He remained deputy director of the CIA until 1989 when he joined the National Security Council. There he stayed through the 1991 war that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In March 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Gates (for a second time) to be head of the CIA. The Senate confirmed Gates in early November of that year, and he served until 1993.

When he appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee for confirmation hearings to be secretary of defense, Gates will see some familiar faces from his past, especially if the hearings take place in the lame duck session. Among those who spoke against the nominee in 1991 are current members such as Carl Levin and Edward Kennedy.

They may well resurrect the charges lodged against Gates in 1987 and in 1991. They may ask him again whether he lied to Congress about the extent of his involvement in or knowledge of Iran-Contra. They may want to know whether the CIA, under his watch, altered national intelligence estimates on Soviet capabilities to make the threat seem worse than warranted. Their questioning might probe his involvement in providing military equipment and intelligence to Saddam Hussein during the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran War, all of which helped Saddam in his battles against U.S. forces in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm. More broadly, Gates may be held to account once again for the CIA's failure to predict the demise of the Soviet Union, the lack of monitoring of Saddam's progress toward developing a nuclear weapon in the 1980s, and the "politicizing" of intelligence to support presidential biases.

Anything but Rummy

Whether the U.S. Senate, in the upcoming lame-duck session controlled by the Republicans, will try to push through abbreviated hearings and confirm Gates as soon as possible or leave that task for the new Senate remains unclear. Regardless, even though he's been out of government service for a dozen years except to serve on special commissions such as the current Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, Gates will most likely be confirmed ­ if for no other reason than the Democrats are eager to have anyone other than Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense.

The real test will be whether the change at the Pentagon and the change in Congress will produce any significant alteration in U.S. strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the very least, the U.S. public has expressed its dissatisfaction with the war choices of the administration and Congress. Needed now is planning for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. And the United States must begin to prepare itself psychologically for the day that Iraqis actually assume the full burden of devising a political solution that will be fair and workable for all Iraqi citizens.

On this point, the public will quickly glimpse just how Gates will fit in with other administration players. There may be White House pressure to implement the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group-due out December 7-no questions asked. Gates will have to take a principled stand, if warranted, or be seen as "politicizing" the war.

Mr. Gates, should he be confirmed, has his work cut out for him-as does the new Congress. And neither has time to waste.

Col. Dan Smith is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus, a retired U.S. Army colonel, and a senior fellow on military affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Email at dan@fcnl.org

http://www.counterpunch.org/smith11132006.html