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Ex-defense chief Gates rips Obama in new memoir

WASHINGTON — Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates slams President Obama for feckless leadership in an astonishing new memoir, in which he also reveals that he detested his job.

Gates, who stepped down in 2011 after running the Pentagon for both President George W. Bush and Obama, even questions Obama’s commitment to his own strategy in Afghanistan, according to excerpts obtained by The Washington Post.

Gates wrote that by early 2010, he had concluded that Obama “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates recalled, adding that he “never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission.”

The revelations in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” scheduled for release Jan. 14, came as something of a shock because former Cabinet officials almost never unleash such harsh criticism on a sitting president.

Furthermore, Gates, 70, had a reputation in office as even-tempered and a team player.

But the 594-page book is filled with criticisms of the administration leaders he served.

He recalled an episode that left him unsettled when Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton chatted about their opposition to the troop surge in Iraq in 2007, when both were running for the White House.

“Hillary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary,” Gates said. “The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

Gates revealed that he almost quit after a dispute-filled meeting with Vice President Joe Biden and other advisers over Afghan policy in September 2009.

“I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation — from the top down — of the uncertainties and unpredictability of war,” he wrote. “I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it.”

Gates said he got so fed up at one point that he e-mailed a friend: “People have no idea how much I detest this job.”

Some of Gates’ most stinging critiques were aimed at the veep.

“I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades,” he said of Biden, who once led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In a seeming contradiction to his otherwise bitter depiction of the administration, Gates also dished out compliments, calling Obama
“a man of integrity.”

He commended Obama’s strategy choices in Afghanistan, despite his portrayal of the president lacking faith in those plans.

“I believe Obama was right in each of these decisions,” Gates said.