On Election Day, the American people spoke very strongly that the direction the President and the Republican Party were taking America towards, is not the direction the country wanted to go in.
Presidents are not oblivious to polls. They may not honor them, but they are not oblivious to them. The most important issue within the campaign clothed to be two issues, consistent with the exit polls.
They were CORRUPTION, and IRAQ in that order. The President was quick with a lightening type response to the election. I felt Donald Rumsfeld was going to be fired 3 or 4 weeks after the election to allow him to leave with his dignity intact.
The President dispatched the now lamb duck Secretary within hours after the voters made their decisions. In doing so, the President is insuring that this Congress will ratify the nomination of Robert Gates, not a Democratic Congress convening in January of 07. What sort of man is Robert Gates, the D Sec, as they call the Secretary of Defense? There are parallels to this selection.
During the height of the View Nam War, after six-plus years in office, Robert McNamara was a worn, beaten man troubled by his running of that war. His children had even turned against him. His friends advised, how can he continue to be a part of this mess? McNamara left, and Lyndon Johnson installed Clark Clifford, one of my heroes who was a legal advisor to every Democratic President since Harry Truman.
Clifford was even Joe Kennedy’s lawyer, the daddy of the longer-term slain President. Johnson thought that Clifford would become an absolute HAWK on Vietnam, and switch up the pressure on the war. Instead, he advised Johnson, you're in an unwinnable situation, and that I advise a negotiated settlement.
Johnson swallowed hard and announced he wouldn't be his party’s candidate for nomination or re-election within the upcoming months. Robert Gates, the new incoming Secretary of Defense, is that this President’s second plan to reach bent his father’s advisors to assist HIM. In the last 3 years, not once has this President spoken to the foremost important advisor he could have spoken with, regarding what to try to do in Iraq – namely his father, George Herbert Walker Bush.
Now when the Iraq war has become a quagmire without stopping in view, this President has chosen his father’s CIA director, Robert Gates, to step in and turn this thing around. Gates was a student of Brent Scow croft (former National Security Advisor), as was Condoleezza Rice, our Secretary of State. Scow croft is taken into account, the last word low-key professional who ran White House policy when George HW Bush was President. Most people think Secretary of State James Baker called the shots, that’s only partially correct. Scow croft was the professional with the experience.
Baker learned in fact because the years glided by, and have become an effective, diplomatic Secretary of State. Gates was there all the time, a professional intelligence analyst who is the only CIA career employee to rise from the bottom to become Director. The President’s current status This President is in trouble, and therefore the people that surrounded him called the Neo-Cons got him into the mess he’s in.
What you would like to know is that George Bush unlike many other politicians believes what he says, and says what he believes. This man’s hero is probably Harry Truman, who walked out of the White House with an approval rating approaching 25% in 1953 and went on to be venerated by succeeding generations of Americans. President Bush does not play to the crowd.
This is evident in his news conferences when he can't help but show his feelings when reporters ask the stupidest “SHOWBOAT” questions. Bush won't have any a part of it. He is an authentic guy that lives his life that way. If the Iraq Study Group, chaired by former Secretary of State Baker, gives the President some very tough advice on Iraq, he just might take it. Bush is not a fool.
He knows this war is not going well. He also knows the American people wish to keep their Presidents on a brief leash when it involves wars, and therefore the free ride is now over. For the moment, the pressure on President Bush can only get worse. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was taking the warmth that rightfully belonged to the President. Rumsfeld as a foil for this country’s anger is now gone.
Bush will instead take the heat himself. He has no problem with that if he is the President and continues to believe in the righteousness of his actions, and for the moment he does.
The President has been constantly underestimated by his opponents. You don’t win two national elections, and one Congressional election in between, by being a fool. Bob Gates is going to change things at the Defense Department and change them quickly. Do not for one moment believe that Rumsfeld was wrong on everything he did, that’s nonsense. He did get four big things wrong.
1, he underestimated the post-Iraq war need for US troop levels. It takes more troops to govern a country and quell discontent than to invade and take over.
2, He did accept the removal of the Iraqi army. That army could have been utilized to rebuild and govern post-war Iraq. We simply had to PAY THEM a sum of cash adequate to a fraction of what we are paying Halliburton for a failed US policy. Thirdly, he participated in or instigated the firing of the Sunnis who ran the Iraqi government before finding COMPETENT REPLACEMENTS to replace those fired. They knew the way to turn the electricity on and keep the machinery of the state functioning. Even General Patton at the tail end of WW II used Nazi bureaucrats until he could train his bureaucrats.
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