Author Topic: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat  (Read 1449 times)

Soul Crusher

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haider

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #1 on: January 07, 2014, 08:11:52 PM »
so if you are going to take the bad, will you also notice the positive things he said about the president?
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Soul Crusher

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2014, 08:18:31 PM »
so if you are going to take the bad, will you also notice the positive things he said about the president?

No    ;D

haider

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #3 on: January 07, 2014, 08:23:58 PM »
No    ;D
I swear to god you are the most likable guy I happen to dislike at times I have ever seen, no homo   :D
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Soul Crusher

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #4 on: January 07, 2014, 08:26:30 PM »
I swear to god you are the most likable guy I happen to dislike at times I have ever seen, no homo   :D

Im not the caveman in person i portray myself as sometimes.    I read the whole thing.  Seems like Obama distrusts the military and they distrust him. 

240 is Back

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #5 on: January 07, 2014, 08:51:35 PM »
No    ;D


LOL!   Not fair, but totally honest haha!

temple_of_dis

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #6 on: January 07, 2014, 09:57:48 PM »

dario73

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #7 on: January 08, 2014, 05:17:48 AM »
so if you are going to take the bad, will you also notice the positive things he said about the president?

That is assuming that the positives outweigh the negatives, WHICH IN THIS CASE THEY DON'T.

headhuntersix

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #8 on: January 08, 2014, 07:48:50 AM »
Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”
...

Gates offers a catalogue of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls “remarkable.”

He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . 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 acknowledges forthrightly in “Duty” that he did not reveal his dismay. “I never confronted Obama directly over what I (as well as [Hillary] Clinton, [then-CIA Director Leon] Panetta, and others) saw as the president’s determination that the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and even operations. His White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.”

...

It got so bad during internal debates over whether to intervene in Libya in 2011 that Gates says he felt compelled to deliver a “rant” because the White House staff was “talking about military options with the president without Defense being involved.”



This is interesting. You already read, above, how Gates did not express his objections to Obama. He also withheld his concerns from Congress.

If you've ever thought "Military leaders are not free to offer their real opinions to Congress or the American people," you're right.

But Gates says he did not speak his mind when the committee chairman listed the problems he would face as secretary. “I remember sitting at the witness table listening to this litany of woe and thinking, “What the hell am I doing here? I have walked right into the middle of a category-five shitstorm. It was the first of many, many times I would sit at the witness table thinking something very different from what I was saying.”
L

headhuntersix

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #9 on: January 08, 2014, 07:51:29 AM »
I liked him better them Rummy...however he should have quit if he felt Obama was not being honest about the surge and his afghan policy. he also rolled over on DADT and the draw-down.  It all confirms what a lying worthless POS that Obama is. Book comes out in Jan
L

blacken700

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #10 on: January 08, 2014, 09:01:04 AM »
(By Juan Cole)

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his new memoir is said to have slammed Vice President Joe Biden  for having been consistently “wrong” on foreign policy matters over the past four decades.

Gates’s petty gossip about his former colleagues should put an end to the pusillanimous Democratic Party tradition of appointing Republicans as secretaries of defense in Democratic administrations.

There is a lot to like about Gates. He over time became something like a defensive realist. He appears to have helped prevent Dick Cheney and the Neocons from attacking Iran. He warns against the seductive character of drone warfare, and wants a court to sign off on drone strikes. He said he thought any military commander who wanted to take US troops into another big ground war should have his head examined. He is scathing on the grandstanding and sadism of congressmen during hearings.

But lest it be forgotten, Gates’s career has been checkered and he has been consistently wrong about foreign policy himself. To wit:

1. Gates as a high official at the CIA was involved in the 1970s and 1980s in  vastly exaggerating the economic and military power of the Soviet Union, scaring the American public with a supposed threat that was actually far smaller and less formidable than officials such as Gates alleged. Gates made a career out of politicizing intelligence. Inside the CIA, analysts who tell their bosses what they want to hear are called weasels. Gates was the weaseliest. One of the main reasons the CIA failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was precisely the exaggerations and politicization pushed by Gates.


 



 When he was a high official at the CIA in the mid to late 1980s,  Gates was involved in selling Pentagon weaponry to the Ayatollah Khomeini. That’s right, the dreaded “biggest supporter of terrorism” in the world, the dire security threat to American allies. That Ayatollah Effing Khomeini.
2. When he was a high official at the CIA in the mid to late 1980s,  Gates was involved in selling Pentagon weaponry to the Ayatollah Khomeini. That’s right, the dreaded “biggest supporter of terrorism” in the world, the dire security threat to American allies. That Ayatollah Effing Khomeini. Iran was on the US terrorism watchlist at the time the Reagan administration was making the sales, so you couldn’t have done anything more illegal or hypocritical.

3. Not only did the Reagan administration in which Gates served as a loyal capo illegally steal weaponry from Pentagon warehouses (they had no Congressional authorization to sell them, so it was all black money) and sell them to Iran,  they inflated the price and used the extra money to support the right wing Nicaraguan death squads known as Contras. Gates went back and forth in his later testimony about how much he knew and when he knew of the diversion of funds from the (already illegal) sales of arms to Iran by Col. Oliver North. The Iran-Contra Commission report decided that he had to have known all about it. Congress had passed the Boland amendment forbidding Reagan from sending tax dollars to the Contras. Reagan contravened that Congressional legislation by misappropriating tax-payers’ money (spent on the weaponry sold to Iran), which is unconstitutional. Gates helped him. Among the activities of the nice Contras was  killing leftwing nuns.

4. Gates was, further,  involved in further covert provision of weaponry, including chemicals and biological precursors to Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Iraq in the 1980s used chemical weapons against Iran at the front and then against innocent Kurds at Halabja in 1988. The Reagan administration blocked Iranian attempts to take a complaint against Iraq to the UN Security Council.

5.  Gates was among the architects of the US policy of giving billions to far right Muslim jihadis (Mujahideen) such as Gulbadin Hikmatyar in northern Pakistan to fight, first the left wing Afghan government in 1979 and then the Soviet Union. The current Afghanistan War that Gates accuses President Obama of being lukewarm about is a direct consequence of the Reagan administration’s decision to fund a private army of jihadis against secular, pro-worker forces.

6. The Afghanistan jihad waged by Gates and others at the  CIA involved pressuring Saudi intelligence also to raise funds for it. The Saudis asked Osama Bin Laden to help as a fundraiser. He went to Peshawar and founded the Office of Services with Abdullah Azzam, and came back to Saudi mosques to fundraise. The Office of Services eventually became al-Qaeda. Gates was therefore an accessory to the rise of al-Qaeda, an organization that might never have existed if it had not been for CIA covert operations against leftists in the Middle East, operations in which far right wing fundamentalists were cultivated as allies. The CIA established training institutes for the Afghan jihadis, who passed on the techniques they learned (cell formation, planning covert ops, weapons and explosives use) to their Arab colleagues in what became al-Qaeda. Gates’s CIA helped to create the “terror” that they later dragooned us all into a war against.

7. Gates and others in the Reagan administration appear to have downplayed Pakistan’s nuclear program, in part because they wanted Gen. Zia ul-Haq’s help against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Oooops.

8. Gates thinks that the 2007 Bush troop escalation or “surge” was effective. In fact, the US troops disarmed the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad, leaving them open to being ethnically cleansed from mixed neighborhoods by Shiite militias. After a while there weren’t so many mixed neighborhoods.

9. Gates was confident in 2008 that a troop escalation  in Afghanistan could allow for free and fair elections and actually said that the Taliban held no territory and the security problems in that country were exaggerated.

10. Gates asserts that he believes that once the US winds down its military role in Afghanistan, that country will be on a fairly good track to success. In fact, Obama’s skepticism about whether the Petraeus counter-insurgency plan could succeed has been entirely borne out by events. As for Gates’s criticism of Obama for not trusting Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, surely he jests. Karzai is a wild card.

It is incredible that someone with this astonishing record of reckless policies, some of which were later implicated in the 9/11 attacks and the resulting wars, should be so highly regarded as a policy-maker. He clearly has had second thoughts about many of those policies and has often been a voice of reason in his old age. But his lifetime record is not one that gives him a platform to attack Joe Biden.

LurkerNoMore

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #11 on: January 08, 2014, 09:01:53 AM »
That is assuming that the positives outweigh the negatives, WHICH IN THIS CASE THEY DON'T.

So you read it and kept score?  What was the final score of positives vs negatives?

Oh, I see you are assuming there.  Which makes the little whinefest that you have in ALL CAPS irrelevant. 

blacken700

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #12 on: January 08, 2014, 09:07:08 AM »
he's really angry when he changes the font size  :D :D :D

JOHN MATRIX

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #13 on: January 08, 2014, 10:07:51 AM »
Gates said Blowhard Biden was 'wrong on virtually everything for the last 4 decades'...lmfao this retard will go down in history as one of the most inept clowns to ever hold public office

chadstallion

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #14 on: January 08, 2014, 10:30:17 AM »
Im not the caveman in person i portray myself as sometimes.   
butt, it's the caveman persona that is hawt!
w

Soul Crusher

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headhuntersix

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #16 on: January 08, 2014, 12:16:10 PM »
Cole has been a regular guest on The NewsHour at the PBS, and has appeared widely on television shows such as Nightline, ABC Evening News, the Today Show, Anderson Cooper 360°, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Al Jazeera and CNN Headline News. Charlie Rose, Fareed Zakaria GPS, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Colbert Report, Democracy Now! and many others/.......

Come on Blacken...gotta post a link. This guy is a muslim loving leftwing douchebag.
L

dario73

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #17 on: January 08, 2014, 12:27:23 PM »
Cole has been a regular guest on The NewsHour at the PBS, and has appeared widely on television shows such as Nightline, ABC Evening News, the Today Show, Anderson Cooper 360°, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Al Jazeera and CNN Headline News. Charlie Rose, Fareed Zakaria GPS, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Colbert Report, Democracy Now! and many others/.......

Come on Blacken...gotta post a link. This guy is a muslim loving leftwing douchebag.

HAHAHAHAHAH!!

Blacken is the board's retard who doesn't even read what he posts or where it came from.

Soul Crusher

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headhuntersix

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #19 on: January 08, 2014, 12:53:53 PM »
Alright enough poking Blacken......Gates brings up the same points that many others who have come from inside the admin have said...Obama does not care about Foreign Policy and has a huge problem with a 'powerful America".  He is intellectually incapable of cobbling together a coherent overseas strategy. He's not smart enough to get people around him who can. He allows people like Valery Jarret to call the shots. As fucked up as Clinton was in some area's, I never got the sense that he hated the country. Obama hates the country. He's not a leader, he doesn't lead...he's basically Pajama Boy...a friggen pansy.
L

Emmortal

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #20 on: January 08, 2014, 02:34:22 PM »
Alright enough poking Blacken......Gates brings up the same points that many others who have come from inside the admin have said...Obama does not care about Foreign Policy and has a huge problem with a 'powerful America".  He is intellectually incapable of cobbling together a coherent overseas strategy. He's not smart enough to get people around him who can. He allows people like Valery Jarret to call the shots. As fucked up as Clinton was in some area's, I never got the sense that he hated the country. Obama hates the country. He's not a leader, he doesn't lead...he's basically Pajama Boy...a friggen pansy.

This is one of the reasons why I think it should be required that everyone serve at least 2 years in the military. 

headhuntersix

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #21 on: January 08, 2014, 03:11:37 PM »
If I became President I'd be dammed sure to get the best possible conservative economic minds available. I'd make sure my whitehouse spokesman was'nt a hated, condesending prick and my sec of state...a dead body would be better then Kerry. I get you need a political animal close to the President...but not your whole team.
L

blacken700

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #22 on: January 08, 2014, 03:29:44 PM »
HAHAHAHAHAH!!

Blacken is the board's retard who doesn't even read what he posts or where it came from.


this coming from a fake christain  :D :D :D :D :D :D and the board bigot,tell us more about the 6000 year old earth  :D :D :D :D :D :D priceless

blacken700

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #23 on: January 08, 2014, 03:30:49 PM »
Cole has been a regular guest on The NewsHour at the PBS, and has appeared widely on television shows such as Nightline, ABC Evening News, the Today Show, Anderson Cooper 360°, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Al Jazeera and CNN Headline News. Charlie Rose, Fareed Zakaria GPS, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Colbert Report, Democracy Now! and many others/.......

Come on Blacken...gotta post a link. This guy is a muslim loving leftwing douchebag.

tell us which of the 10 is not true,

chadstallion

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Re: Bob Gates slams Obama/Biden in new book - slammed to the mat
« Reply #24 on: January 09, 2014, 10:36:12 AM »
This is one of the reasons why I think it should be required that everyone serve at least 2 years in the military. 
yes; bring back the draft for everyone. of a certain age, that is.
w