[PypeDeft]

Bush has just announced his choice of Bob Gates to take over as Secretary of Defense ...

From wikipedia :

Dr. Robert Michael Gates (born September 25, 1943) could become the 22nd United States Secretary of Defense. President Bush announced on November 8th, 2006 his intention to nominate Gates for the position which requires Senate confirmation. Previous to that office, he served as Director of Central Intelligence from November 6, 1991 until January 20, 1993, capping a 26-year career in the CIA and the National Security Council. Immediately before being nominated to the post of Secretary of Defense, he was the President of Texas A&M University and the National President of the National Eagle Scout Association. He and his wife Becky have two children. He has been mentioned as a potential replacement for outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Gates while at the CIA was a central figure in the Iran / Contra Scandal during the Reagan Presidency:

Robert M. Gates was the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy director for intelligence (DDI) from 1982 to 1986. He was confirmed as the CIA's deputy director of central intelligence (DDCI) in April of 1986 and became acting director of central intelligence in December of that same year. Owing to his senior status in the CIA, Gates was close to many figures who played significant roles in the Iran/contra affair and was in a position to have known of their activities. The evidence developed by Independent Counsel did not warrant indictment of Gates for his Iran/contra activities or his responses to official inquiries.

[nasdfrdg]

Pearl Harbor Redux: The Warning Failure

http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0110cia.html

By Melvin A Goodman
October 22, 2001
... In his memoirs, former secretary of state George Shultz demonstrated that CIA involvement in a policy of covert action tainted its intelligence. His memoirs remind us that when operations and analysis get mixed up, "the president gets bum dope." Shultz demonstrated how this happened in the 1980s in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, all contributign to the strife we face today in Southwest Asia. CIA director William Casey and his deputy Robert Gates covered up important intelligence regarding Pakistani nuclear developments in order to protect the covert action program supporting the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, and they exaggerated the role of the Stingers against Soviet forces in order to trumpet clandestine deliveries of surface-to-air weapons. When I challenged the operational director of the deliveries about providing weapons to the most reactionary members of the mujahedeen long after the Soviet withdrawal, he responded "we merely delivered the weapons to Pakistan and let God sort it out." This is the mentality that provided weapons and influence to Bin Laden and other anti-western fanatics.

There is no doubt that Washington has the will, resolve, and character to eventually win the war against terrorism. But such a victory will demand accurate and objective intelligence analysis, both short-term and tactical as well as long-term and strategic. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld recently stated that the role of intelligence will be more important than military operations in the war against terrorism.

But the CIA will have to install a new leadership team, particularly in its intelligence and operations directorates, to replace those individuals who have come from staff positions at the Senate intelligence committee to become the CIA director and his chief of staff. The CIA also rewarded those individuals who contributed to the politicization of intelligence under Robert Gates, including the current deputy CIA director, the deputy director for intelligence, the national intelligence officer for Russia and Europe, the chief of legislative affairs, and the head of the school for the study of intelligence. These careerists carry the message that the CIA still favors a management style that puts personal ambition ahead of solid intelligence analysis.

[inofindy]

Full-Speed Ahead?

Andrew Sullivan
08 Nov 2006

Lawrence Eagleburger just said on Fox that he expects that Gates was selected precisely because he won't change course in Iraq. This interview with a former close colleague of Gates, Fritz W. Ermarth, suggests the same. I sure hope they're wrong.

It looks to me like Daddy's friends are bailing out "the boy" again. Well, at least someone is. At this point, I'll take anyone not clinically delusional.

***

Knowing Gates

11.08.2006

Fritz W. Ermarth — who worked closely with Robert Gates during his broad intelligence and policy career — gives his perspective of what Gates’s leadership at the Pentagon could mean in terms of Iraq, intelligence gathering, and more. In his interview with National Interest online editor, Ximena Ortiz, Ermarth points to what Gates would have done and could do differently on vital issues. Mr. Ermath served as chairman of the National Intelligence Council during the time Gates was director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

TNI: You have worked closely with Robert Gates.

FWE: Yes I have, off and on since 1973, until our ways parted in the early ‘90s when he left government and retired from the agency. So from the early ‘70s to the early ’90s we worked pretty closely, on and off.

TNI: Please give use your perspective as to what this change of leadership at the Pentagon might mean in terms of U.S. strategy in Iraq and beyond.

FWE: Well, from everything the president has said, the strategy won’t basically change. Now, I can’t guarantee that sitting here in my study, but the execution you can count on will be very thoughtful and careful. That’s the kind of person Gates is. But until the president signals it, I don’t think you ought to look for a change of strategy.

TNI: Indeed, it seems from the president’s statements that Gates was chosen not only for his expertise but also for a compliance with a “defeat is not an option” mentality in Iraq. How assertive do you think Gates would be in advocating a redirection of policy in Iraq, and do you think he’s ideologically predisposed to a stay-the-course policy?

FWE: Well, you’re picking loaded buzzwords for an interview like this. These have become bumper stickers. I think he appreciates, strategically, that for us to just bail out of there and leave it to the Iraqis alone to sort out the problem would be a disaster for all kinds of reasons — terrorism, regional stability and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. If you call that “stay the course,” I’m sure he’s going to support that. I strongly believe that he will examine the situation carefully, and if it calls for a change of tactics or even strategy, he won’t hesitate to recommend that.

TNI: Do you think he has the personality traits to recommend such a change forcefully?

FWE: I don’t have any doubt he does.

TNI: What could Gates’s Pentagon leadership mean in terms of intelligence gathering at the Department of Defense and the DOD’s cooperation with the national intelligence director?

FWE: Well, Gates’s appointment is a huge plus in the intelligence department, because, to put it in one pithy sentence, it is really one of the key things that can make this National Intelligence Directorship and the reform of our community work. You could put God Almighty in charge of U.S. national intelligence, and he’s got to have a good relationship with a secretary of defense who understands and supports intelligence. And that is Mr. Gates, par excellence. It is going to be a real plus for intelligence because it’ll put to rest a lot of this nonsense about turf wars between the secretary of defense and the national intelligence director. There’s just no way you can cut that baby in half, and he is the man in the Pentagon that could make that work.

TNI: Is there anything you would like to add on your perspective of Gates?

FWE: Yes indeed. In addition to the intelligence role that he will play, and a definite muting if not elimination of the tensions between the Pentagon and the national intelligence director, he brings two big things to the party. One, he understands big agencies, big programs, lots of people and lots of money — from being the director of central intelligence, being in the national-security business all these years and running a big university. If you’ve ever been in a university faculty or administration, you’d know what I mean. That is really demanding, and he’s evidently done that very well.

But let me underscore a point I made earlier: This is an extremely thoughtful man. He’s got his values, he’s got his principles, you might even say he’s got his ideology. He checks everything. He does not get pushed into decisions on impulse.

Frankly, if he’d have been secretary of defense in 2003, I guarantee you there’d have been a backup plan that would have avoided or certainly minimized the problems that we’ve had since.

TNI: You mentioned: “you might even say he’s got his ideology.” Is there something in his ideology or in his career experience that would now make him particularly suited to put into effect such a backup plan?

FWE: He’s very realistic, and he’s very committed to the exercise of American power in a thoughtful way, and I think for all those reasons he’s an excellent choice.

TNI: What would you say his ideology is?

FWE: He’s a national security professional. He comes from a camp with which I personally identify. He understands strategic realities such that he’ll know we can’t back out of the situation we have in Iraq, but we can’t stay in it either without behaving very deftly and getting as much support as we can.

The National Interest is published by The Nixon Center

Copyright © 2006 The National Interest All rights reserved.

[xsexymasterix]

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1991_cr/#gates

Particularily good are the NY Times Editorial:

[FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, OCT. 18, 1991]
The Once and Future C.I.A.


These have not been stellar years for the Central Intelligence Agency. Even with the distinguished outsider Judge William Webster in charge, the once-proud agency has, at least to public perception, flunked. Who there anticipated the fall of the Berlin wall, the aggression of Saddam Hussein, the implosion of the Soviet Union?

Nevertheless, President Bush contends he needs an experienced insider and has nominated Robert Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence, a choice the Senate Intelligence Committee votes on today. There are strong reasons to vote no.

Mr. Gates has done his best to dispel the doubts that forced him to withdraw when he was first nominated in 1987. He has seemed contrite and open-minded and cites his broad experience and future vision. But senators would do well to consider at least three criteria.

Whether his past performance shows him to warrant their trust. . . whether he has earned the confidence of agency employees . . . and above all, whether he, an insider, is the right person to lead the agency into uncertain times. On each count, Mr. Gates falls short.

David Boren, the committee chairman, commends Mr. Gates for forthrightness. Yet he overlooks occasions when Mr. Gates helped skew intelligence assessments and was demonstrably blind to illegality. The illegality concerns the Iran-contra scandal. Mr. Gates contends he was `out of the loop' on decisions about what to tell Congress. And he defends his professed ignorance on grounds of deniability--that he was shielding the C.I.A. from involvement. These contentions defy belief.

The testimony of other puts Mr. Gates, on at least two occasions, very much in the loop. He supervised preparation of Director William Casey's deceitful testimony to Congress about the scandal. And one C.I.A. analyst, Charles Allen, says he informed Mr. Gates, before it came to light, of three unforgettable details: Oliver North's involvement, the markup of prices of arms sold surreptitiously to Iran, and diversion of the proceeds into a fund for covert operations. In a telling lapse of his reputedly formidable memory, Mr. Gates could not recall the details when Congress asked two months later.

The second criterion concerns intelligence estimates. Incorrect forecasting should not be disqualifying; estimates can be wrong for the right reasons of political expediency, that's `cooking the books.'

The hearings have documented at least three cases of such slanting: a May 1985 estimate on Iran, estimates of Soviet influence in the third world, and assessments of Soviet complicity in the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Mr. Gates has responded to their testimony but not refuted it. He evidently went to great lengths to manipulate the process, because highly reticent career officials testified against him in public. That electrifying development demonstrates how little confidence Mr. Gates enjoys in the agency.

It can be argued that his experience makes him well suited to lead the C.I.A. into the future. As a former Deputy Director and deputy national security adviser, he knows how intelligence assessments are put together and what policy makers need. And he knows the U.S. will not keep spending $30 billion a year on intelligence.

But it is more reasonable to think the agency would be better off with a director unbound by William Casey's dark legacy--the conviction that the agency knows best, a barely concealed contempt for Congress and a belief that anything goes including evading the law. Reshaping the agency wisely depends on casting off the legacy.

Thomas Polgar, a C.I.A. veteran, urged the committee to consider the message that confirmation would send. Would officials wonder whether it was wise for outspoken witnesses to risk their careers by testifying? Would they say to themselves, `Serve faithfully the boss of the moment; never mind integrity? Feel free to mislead the Senate--senators forget easily?
By voting no, senators will vote to remember.



And Harkin's speech:

Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the nomination of Robert Gates to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.


Mr. President, at the outset of the confirmation hearings, I had serious reservations about the nominee. The confirmation hearings only raised more questions and greater doubts. Questions and doubts about Mr. Gates' past activities, managerial style, judgment, lapses in memory and analytical abilities. Questions and doubts about his role in the Iran-Contra Affair and in providing military intelligence to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war; and questions and doubts about whether he will be able to remove the ideological blinders reflected in his writings and speeches or whether Mr. Gates is so rooted in the past, that he will not be able to lead the Agency into the post-cold war era. Because of these concerns, I have concluded that Mr. Gates is not the right person for the important job of overseeing our intelligence operations in this New World.

Mr. President, Robert Gates is a career Soviet analyst and former Deputy Director of the CIA who was wrong about what CIA analyst Harold Ford described as `the central analytic target of the past few years: the probable fortunes of the USSR and the Soviet European bloc.' And I believe that the committee report points out one possible reason why the CIA failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to testimony, Mr. Gates was busy pursuing hypotheses and making unsubstantiated arguments attempting to show Soviet expansion in the Third World, instead of looking for or paying attention to facts that pointed in the opposite direction. Why? Why, as Mentor Moynihanhas pointed out, was the CIA able to tell Presidents everything about the Soviet Union except the fact that it was falling apart?

Mr. Gates was also wrong about the Soviet threat to Iran in 1985. The 1985 Special National Intelligence Estimate on Iran stressed possible Soviet inroads into Iran. Gates admits that the analysis was an anomaly. It was a clear departure from previous analyses and almost immediately proven wrong by subsequent events. Gates was involved in preparing that analysis. According to Hal Ford, whose testimony the nominee never refuted, Gates leaned heavily on the Iran Estimate, in effect, `insisting on his own views and discouraging dissent.' What was the result? The 1985 estimate was skewed and contributed to the biggest foreign policy debacle of the Reagan administration, the sale of arms to Iran.

Mr. President, Graham Fuller, the CIA's National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, suggested that the 1985 SNIE estimate was based on intuition in the absence of hard evidence. I agree there is nothing wrong with preparing worse case scenarios or using `intuition' as opposed to hard evidence in the preparation of analysis, provided it is made clear to policymakers that the finished analysis is based on intuition and not hard evidence. It is the job of the CIA to sort out fact from fiction, not convert one into the other.

Mr. President, I also have doubts and questions about Mr. Gates' role in the secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq. Robert Gates served as assistant to the Director of the CIA in 1981 and as Deputy Director for Intelligence for 1982 to 1986. In that capacity he helped develop options in dealing with the Iran-Iraq war, which eventually involved into a secret intelligence liaison relationship with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Gates was in charge of the directorate that prepared the intelligence information that was passed on to Iraq. He testified that he was also an active participant in the operation during 1986. The secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq was not only a highly questionable and possibly illegal operation, but also may have jeopardized American lives and our national interests. The photo reconnaissance, highly sensitive electronic eavesdropping and narrative texts provided to Saddam, may not only have helped him in Iraq's war against Iran but also in the recent gulf war. Saddam Hussein may have discovered the value of underground land lines as opposed to radio communications after he was give our intelligence information. That made it more difficult for the allied coalition to get quick and accurate intelligence during the gulf war. Further, after the Persian Gulf war, our intelligence community was surprised at the extent of Iraq's nuclear program. One reason Saddam may have hidden his nuclear program so effectively from detection was because of his knowledge of our satellite photos. What also concerns me about that operation is that we spend millions of dollars keeping secrets from the Soviets and then we give it to Saddam who sells them to the Soviets. In short, the coddling of Saddam was a mistake of the first order.

Mr. President, I've stated a very simple case for rejecting the nomination of Robert Gates to be Director of the CIA. The fact that he was wrong on major issues which in some instances led to foreign policy debacles. I haven't addressed concerns about the allegations of his politicization of intelligence analysis, his apparently poor managerial style or still unanswered questions about his role in the Iran-Contra affair. Regarding the Iran-Contra affair, I should mention that I was quite disturbed to hear testimony that portrayed Robert Gates as someone concerned about Agency's role and not sufficiently concerned about pursuing possible illegal Government activities. In his opening statement before the Intelligence Committee, Mr. Gates said that he should have taken more seriously `the possibility of impropriety or possible wrongdoing in the Government and pursued this possibility more aggressively.' I agree.

I should also mention, Mr. President, that aside from Mr. Gates' poor judgment in not pursuing the possibility of Government wrongdoing more aggressively, I still find it incredible that the Deputy Director of CIA was not aware of that major covert operation. How could such a high ranking official not know about the CIA's efforts to support the Contras? Did he purposely avoid trying to find out what was happening? The testimony seemed to indicate he did. Gates' selective lapses in recall about the affair by a man with a photographic memory raises serious doubts.

The U.S. Congress and the American people depend on accurate and reliable intelligence information. Our expenditures on defense and other areas are often decided on the basis of that information. We cannot afford to waste billion of dollars in the future. After reviewing the record, I do not believe that the Central Intelligence Agency under the directorship of Robert Gates will provide the clear intelligence assessments necessary for Congress to make decisions to deal with the future threats confronting our nation.
Mr. President, I do not believe that Robert Gates is the right person to lead the CIA at this time. The cold war is over and it's time for some of the old warriors to rest. Now we must take a fresh new look at the world, think new thoughts and reassess the future role of the intelligence community. I urge my colleagues to vote against Robert Gates.

[Lafclaria]

Robert Gates, the anti-Rumsfeld?

New defense secretary is seen as cautious and pragmatic

International Herald Tribune
By Scott Shane
The New York Times
November 9, 2006

In nominating Robert Gates as his next defense secretary, President George W. Bush reached back to an earlier era in Republican foreign policy, one marked more by caution and pragmatism than that of the neoconservatives who have shaped the Bush administration's war in Iraq and confrontations with Iran and North Korea.

Soft-spoken but tough-minded, Gates, 63, is in many ways the antithesis of Donald Rumsfeld, the brash leader he would succeed. He has been privately critical of the administration's failure to execute its military and political plans for Iraq, and, as a member of the Iraq Study Group directed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, he has spent eight months quietly debating new approaches to the war.

Gates last served in Washington 13 years ago, and Bush made clear Wednesday that he regarded his nominee as someone who would bring new perspective to the final two years of his tenure.

Gates served President George H.W. Bush as deputy national security adviser and then as director of central intelligence. He was not part of the group that advised the current president during his 2000 campaign, and he has publicly questioned the administration's approach to Iran, saying in a 2004 report for the Council on Foreign Relations that its refusal to talk to the government in Tehran was self-defeating.

"This is a signal that there will be a major effort to avoid confrontation on national security issues," said Dov Zakheim, a senior official in Rumsfeld's Pentagon who left in 2004. He described Gates as "a pragmatist and a realist" who would be "no lightning rod."

A longtime Soviet analyst who spent two decades at the CIA, Gates was a deputy to Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, during the elder Bush's administration. There, he worked closely with Baker and Condoleezza Rice. General Michael Hayden, now the CIA director, also served on the staff of the National Security Council at the time.

Gates was confirmed in 1991 as director of central intelligence after a bruising confirmation fight in which subordinates alleged that he had politicized reporting on the Soviet Union. He has spent 13 years outside government, in lucrative business posts and at Texas A&M University, first as dean of the George Bush School of Government and since 2002 as president.

Only 22 months ago, Gates turned down Bush's invitation to become the first director of national intelligence. After agonizing for more than two weeks, Gates later recounted, he decided during a tearful late-night walk that he "could not leave" the university to return to Washington.

But since March, as a member of Baker's Iraq Study Group, Gates has been pondering the central defense quandary facing the administration. Summoned to the president's ranch in Texas over the weekend and offered the defense secretary's job, this time Gates said yes.

"Because so many of America's sons and daughters in our armed forces are in harm's way, I did not hesitate when the president asked me to return to duty," Gates said Wednesday at the White House ceremony to announce his appointment.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter and the author with Gates of the report on Iran policy, said he hoped the appointment would mean "a major corrective in American policy toward the Middle East."

Gates was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, where his father sold wholesale auto parts. He studied European history at the College of William and Mary and was recruited by the CIA while completing a master's degree at Indiana University.

Gates first served on the National Security Council staff from 1974 to 1979 under Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford and Carter. After returning to the CIA, he was given a series of pivotal jobs by its director at the time, William Casey, including deputy director and chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

If Gates was reluctant to return to Washington, it may be because he knows what it means to be at the center of political crossfire. First picked by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 to succeed Casey as director of central intelligence, Gates withdrew in the face of senators' concern that he had not been candid about his knowledge of the Iran-contra affair.

In 1991, renominated by the elder Bush, he faced a grueling confirmation hearings involving not only the Iran- contra affair but also some colleagues' accusation that he had skewed intelligence reporting on the Soviet Union to suit the Reagan White House. Gates became the youngest director of central intelligence in history and oversaw the initial effort to redirect the agency toward post-Cold War threats.

He later defended his record in a 1996 memoir, "From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War."

On Wednesday, a CIA subordinate who had clashed with him offered a harsh assessment. "This is not a person with a history of telling truth to power," said Melvin Goodman, a Soviet analyst from 1966 to 1990. Goodman called Gates a micromanager and "not a big- picture person," though he also called him "a hard-working, disciplined person who's totally loyal to his bosses."

David Boren, a former Democratic chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, had warm praise for Gates's service. "I found him to be highly intelligent, an excellent manager of the large and complex intelligence community, and totally bipartisan in his approach," Boren said in a statement.

Bobby Inman, a former deputy director of central intelligence and director of the National Security Agency and an old friend of Gates, called him "a good listener" who, "after he makes up his mind, is very decisive."

"He's impatient with those whose minds don't move as fast as his does, but he's not arrogant," Inman said. He likened Gates's nomination to President Lyndon Johnson's choice of Clark Clifford, another unflappable Washington hand, to replace the lightning rod Robert McNamara as defense secretary in 1968 at the height of the war in Vietnam.

A hint of the approach Gates might bring to the job, drawing on his experience at the end of the Cold War, can be found in his remarks in 2004 at the release of the Council on Foreign Relations report, called "Iran: Time for a New Approach."

"One of our recommendations is that the U.S. government lift its ban in terms of nongovernmental organizations being able to operate in Iran," Gates said. "Greater interaction between Iranians and the rest of the world," he said, "sets the stage for the kind of internal change that we all hope will happen there."

David E. Sanger contributed reporting.

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune

[VXHLrsO1]

Well, hope springs eternal, but that sounds like a truckload of crap to me, given what else we already know about him. I guess we'll see. I did reserve his book at the library though, that ought be interesting. NYC library system has only two copies, I've got the fifth hold, I'll bet the total number climbs a bit in coming weeks.

[freevideom]

^ A man who reads.

[RedImmik]

Oh, how many people I've run across today who think it's BILL Gates!

[mGUuZRyA]

Oh, how many people I've run across today who think it's BILL Gates!

Maybe it ought to be.

[skydaypat]

Gates spells out stakes he sees in Iraq

By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
12/19/06

WASHINGTON - Robert Gates, the new defense secretary, wasted no time spelling out the stakes he sees in Iraq.

In his first public remarks as Pentagon chief, Gates warned Monday that failure in Iraq would be a "calamity" that would haunt the United States for years. He said he would go there soon to consult with commanders.

Underscoring eroding security in Iraq, a Pentagon report — issued just hours after Gates was sworn in as the nation's 22nd secretary of defense — said the number of insurgent and sectarian attacks had risen to the highest level in years. It said civil war remains a possibility and urged the Iraqi government to act with urgency to prevent collapse.

Gates sketched out an agenda of reversing the downward spiral in Iraq, attending to resurgent violence in Afghanistan and pushing for the military modernization that was a priority of his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Iraq, he said, comes first.

"All of us want to find a way to bring America's sons and daughters home again," Gates told a few hundred people in a Pentagon auditorium, including President Bush, Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Gates' wife and mother. Rumsfeld, who handed off his authority earlier Monday in a private event, did not attend.

"As the president has made clear," Gates said, "we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come."

Gates has not tipped his hand on the kinds of changes in Iraq strategy he thinks may be needed. He said that since his Senate confirmation in early December he has held in-depth discussions with Bush on Iraq policy.

More broadly, Gates has said he will keep an open mind about other issues at the Pentagon, including proposals by the heads of the Army and Marine Corps to increase the size of their services to cope with the strains of war. Last week, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's top commander, warned that his force "will break" without thousands more active duty troops and greater use of the reserves.

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, said in an interview Monday that he feels certain Gates will have the latitude within the administration to push for a bigger Army and Marine Corps. "The question is going to be how high" to go, Ryan said.

At the Pentagon ceremony, Bush said he is confident Gates, 63, will bring a fresh perspective to the Iraq problem.

"He knows the stakes in the war on terror," Bush said. "He recognizes this is a long struggle against an enemy unlike any our nation has fought before. He understands that defeating the terrorists and the radicals and the extremists in Iraq and the Middle East is essential to leading toward peace."

Bush made no mention of his plan for changing Iraq strategy, which he has said will be unveiled next month.

Amid growing speculation that Bush will choose to send tens of thousands more U.S. troops to Baghdad in a reinvigorated attempt to quell the sectarian violence, a leading Democrat in Congress cautioned against that move.

"Everything I've heard and everything I know to be true lead me to believe that this increase at best won't change a thing, and at worst could exacerbate the situation even further," said Rep. Ike Skelton (news, bio, voting record), the Missouri Democrat who will become chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in January.

U.S. commanders moved several thousand more U.S. troops into Baghdad last summer in a bid to tamp down the violence. The move worked briefly, but the violence rebounded quickly, according to the Pentagon report sent to Congress on Monday.

The Pentagon report said attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops and Iraqi civilians jumped sharply in recent months to the highest level since Iraq regained its sovereignty in June 2004. From mid-August to mid-November, the weekly average number of attacks increased 22 percent from the previous three months. The worst violence was in Baghdad and in the western province of Anbar, long the focus of activity by Sunni insurgents, the report said.

A bar chart in the Pentagon's report gave no exact numbers but indicated the weekly average had approached 1,000 in the latest period, compared with about 800 per week from the May-to-August period. Statistics provided separately by the Pentagon said weekly attacks had averaged 959 in the latest period.

The report also said the Iraqi government's failure to end sectarian violence has eroded ordinary Iraqis' confidence in their future. That conclusion reflects some of the Bush administration's doubt about the ability of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to make the hard decisions U.S. officials insist are needed to quell the violence.

"The failure of the government to implement concrete actions in these areas has contributed to a situation in which, as of October 2006, there were more Iraqis who expressed a lack of confidence in their government's ability to improve the situation than there were in July 2006," the report said, calling for urgent action in Baghdad.

It made no mention of a timetable for ending U.S. military involvement.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061219/..._st_pe/us_iraq


Iraq, he said, comes first. --> The lives of American soldiers come second.

[ultimda horaf]

The only thing they have been doing is use the future tense for something that has already hapened.

It is not IF we fail in Iraq, we HAVE failed. Now the question is, how quickly can we pick up the pieces before more fall off and bury those trying to keep it together?

This is something that WILL endanger Americans for decades to come. No If's in that statement. The question is, how do we reduce the impact and try to get a less calamitous result?