Political Insiders: Robert Gates’ tell-all memoir
Memoir raises questions about President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden
With media attention focused on Chris Christie and Bridgegate, it was easy to miss a more important Washington story last week. The other shoe dropped on the Obama presidency.
Still battered at home by the ObamaCare debacle and the permanently sluggish economy, the last thing the White House wanted was bad news on foreign policy. But that’s exactly what it got, and then some, thanks to the shockingly scathing book by Robert Gates.
The former defense secretary offers the most devastating critique to come from an Obama insider. He paints the president as estranged from the very Afghan military surge he ordered and suspicious of and hostile toward top leaders of the armed forces.
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Gates is especially critical of Vice President Joe Biden, writing that he has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.”
He blames Biden and others for leading Obama to believe that military leaders were giving the president “the bum’s rush” in seeking more troops in Afghanistan in 2009, according to excerpts.
“Suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials — including the president and vice president — became a big problem for me,” Gates writes.
Hillary Rodham Clinton also comes off as a craven politician, with Gates saying he witnessed Clinton confess to Obama that she opposed the 2007 Iraq surge because she thought it would help her 2008 presidential campaign.
To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.
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