A demissão do general David McKiernan e o orçamento que conseguiu para o Pentágono são dois exemplos de como Bob Gates tem sido bem-sucedido na Defesa. A opinião é de Gerald Saib, em artigo no Wall Street Journal:
«It now appears that President Barack Obama's shrewdest personnel move wasn't making Timothy Geithner his Treasury secretary, or Lawrence Summers his chief economic adviser.
It was keeping Robert Gates, a Bush administration holdover, as secretary of defense.
Mr. Gates is a smart guy, tough in his own clipped manner, and an extremely crafty bureaucratic operator. All that was known before the president decided to keep him on.
It isn't Timothy Geithner or Larry Summers. Obama's decision to ask Bush-appointed Robert Gates to stay at his Pentagon post has been Obama's best move so far, Jerry Seib says.
What's now clear is that Mr. Gates, as someone appointed to top national-security jobs by the past two Republican presidents, brought to the table a credibility that no Obama appointee would have had in making a series of difficult decisions without setting off a political firestorm.
Consider three specific cases:
The debate over harsh interrogation methods. First, Mr. Gates provided important political cover to the president by endorsing his decision to release the secret memos the Bush administration used to justify waterboarding and other interrogation tactics for terrorism suspects. That decision still was attacked by those who thought the disclosure harmed American intelligence efforts, but Mr. Gates's endorsement went a long way toward muting the criticism.
Then, just this week, he helped keep the president out of hot water by tipping a second, related decision in the opposite direction. Mr. Gates successfully argued that the administration should try to block the court-ordered release of photos of prisoners under interrogation. He channeled into the White House military commanders' deep worries about a backlash against American soldiers in the Islamic world if the photos were released. That was enough to persuade key White House aides, and ultimately Mr. Obama, who reversed his previous position and decided to go to court to stop the release.
Changing course was politically embarrassing for the president, but that problem likely pales when compared with the attacks from critics and the military itself that likely would have followed unchallenged release of the photos.
A change of commanders in Afghanistan. The decision to replace the head of allied forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, had the potential to set off fireworks on both the right and left. On the right, there could have been a furor if a relatively new Obama appointee, rather than Mr. Gates, had decided to dump such a senior military officer in the midst of his tour. At the same time, there could have been an uproar on the left because he is being succeeded by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a commander whose background is in the shadowy world of special operations, including seizing and handling terrorism suspects.
But because the switch was a joint Obama-Gates maneuver, criticism was muted on both sides, and largely drowned out by cheers over a decisive shift in approach in Afghanistan.
A radical revamping of the Pentagon budget. Mr. Gates has proposed a sweeping overhaul of Pentagon spending, killing some big, sacred-cow weapons systems designed for fighting a conventional war, and moving the money to less-sexy systems designed for unconventional wars and counterinsurgency operations.
This is a big change, roundly opposed by some lawmakers and defense firms deeply invested in the old programs. Imagine the outcry if a Democrat newly appointed by Mr. Obama had proposed eliminating the F-22 fighter jet and winding down the Army's multibillion-dollar Future Combat Systems program. Charges that Democrats were again reflexively gutting defense would have come instantly.
Such charges couldn't be easily made, though, when the changes came from Mr. Gates, who had pondered them for more than two years.
Mr. Gates can do such things in part because he occupies an unusual position in Washington, and not just because he straddles administrations of two political parties. He had capped a long Washington career with a stint in the job of his dreams, as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, when he left town for business and academia in 1993. And he wasn't particularly eager to return when coaxed by President George W. Bush into taking over at the Pentagon in 2006. He has nothing left to prove, nobody to impress, no next job to covet.
He also knows how to play the Washington game. For proof, simply look at how he handled the release of his new defense budget.
Mr. Gates has been around long enough to know how such a plan normally would be undermined. As soon as the budget started to move around the bureaucracy, it would leak to Capitol Hill, where lobbyists and lawmakers invested in the defense status quo would begin to mount a counterattack before the details were even announced.
So Mr. Gates outfoxed the system. He had Pentagon officials involved in the budget process sign nondisclosure agreements to prevent leaks. After that, defense officials say, he got permission from Mr. Obama to announce the specifics of the Pentagon plan weeks before the rest of the administration's budget details were released. He went public just as the full plan was sent to the White House budget office, aides say, thereby eliminating the mischief-making season.
Then, rather than rely on others to brief congressional leaders, he called them himself to explain his changes, putting his personal imprimatur and credibility on the plan from the outset.
It was a virtuoso bureaucratic performance, showing why Mr. Obama decided that keeping Mr. Gates around was worth whatever grief he took from allies on the left for doing so.»
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