After Rumsfeld: Bid to Reshape the Brain Trust
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 — Robert M. Gates, President Bush’s choice to become defense secretary, has sharply criticized the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war and has made it clear that he would seek advice from moderate Republicans who have been largely frozen out of the White House, according to administration officials and Mr. Gates’s close associates.
The administration officials said that Mr. Bush was aware of Mr. Gates’s critique of current policy and understood that Mr. Gates planned to clear the “E Ring” of the Pentagon, where many of Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s senior political appointees have plotted Iraq strategy.
Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said Thursday afternoon that Mr. Bush regarded his choice of Mr. Gates as “a terrific opportunity” to rethink Iraq.
In doing so, Mr. Gates will be drawing on his experience and contacts from the administration of Mr. Bush’s father, including the former security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. “Gates’s world is Brent Scowcroft and Baker and a whole bunch of people who felt the door had been slammed in their face,” one former official who has discussed Iraq at length with Mr. Gates said Thursday. “The door is about to reopen.”
A close friend of Mr. Gates’s described him as having been “clearly distraught over the incompetence of how the Iraq operation had been run.” The friend said Mr. Gates had returned from a recent visit to Baghdad expressing disbelief that Mr. Rumsfeld, whom Mr. Bush ousted Wednesday, had not responded more quickly to the rapid deterioration of security and that the president had not acted sooner to overhaul the management of the war.
Mr. Gates made his visit as a member of the Iraq Study Group, the commission that is preparing to make recommendations next month about overhauling Iraq strategy. Associates said that Mr. Gates had questioned military leaders there about whether more American troops in the capital could stem the violence, and whether the training of Iraqi troops could be overhauled.
“He didn’t take a view,” one colleague said of Mr. Gates. “But he understood the depth of the mess.”
Mr. Gates has said little in public about Iraq in his current role as president of Texas A&M University. The associates and administration officials would speak only on condition of anonymity because Mr. Gates will face Senate confirmation. But they made it clear that recently he had privately been critical of the administration’s approach.
Senior administration officials have said that pouring more troops into the most violent of the Baghdad neighborhoods is among the possibilities that Mr. Bush may now consider. But they cautioned that the president was hesitant to commit more forces unless Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki provided far more Iraqi troops to the effort. Until now, Mr. Bush has resisted calls from Republicans like Senator John McCain of Arizona, to increase the size of the American force, just as he has rebuffed calls for setting deadlines for the withdrawal of American troops.
On Thursday morning, Mr. Bush said, “I’m open to any idea or suggestion that will help us achieve our goals of defeating the terrorists and ensuring that Iraq’s democratic government succeeds.”
Meeting with reporters later, Mr. Hadley called attention to what he said was a change in tone. “I think you noted the president said the other day that what was going on in Iraq in terms of our efforts were not working well enough and not working fast enough,” he said.
During the campaign leading up to Tuesday’s elections, Mr. Bush declared unambiguously on several occasions that “we’re winning” and vowed not to leave Iraq until victory had been achieved. Over the past two days, however, several officials said that Mr. Gates would likely be given some latitude to redefine what constitutes victory.
Mr. Hadley sidestepped a question about a report Mr. Gates co-wrote two years ago urging direct engagement with Iran — a step Mr. Bush has so far refused to take until Iran suspends its enrichment of uranium. But Mr. Hadley said he was certain that before Mr. Gates accepted the nomination, the two men were “pretty confident themselves that they’re on the same page on the basic pillars of the president’s foreign policy.”
Other officials, however, said that Mr. Gates’s appointment was timed to anticipate the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, created earlier this year with the reluctant agreement of the White House. The two leaders of that group, Mr. Baker and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman, resisted holding any discussions about what recommendations the commission should make until after the election, for fear their deliberations would leak or become politicized. The group will meet with Mr. Bush on Monday and Democratic leaders on Tuesday, and it will reconvene to settle on recommendations immediately after Thanksgiving, according to members of the commission.
Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that Mr. Bush had not asked Mr. Gates before choosing him as defense secretary about any conversations he might have had with other members of the Iraq Study Group.
“He’s been very clear about the importance that that — those deliberations and that advice — remain confidential and independent,” Mr. Snow said of Mr. Bush.
Mr. Gates, 63, has not tipped his hand on the changes he would favor, and several officials said they now expected him to recuse himself from the study group’s deliberations, because he would have to advise Mr. Bush about which of the recommendations to accept. But several administration officials said they saw his appointment as part of a carefully orchestrated course change in which Mr. Bush fired the man who became the symbol of resistance to changes of tactics and hired one of his critics.
Inside the White House and the State Department on Thursday, officials were already speculating about the informal advisers Mr. Gates was expected to bring in with him, talking about them as if they were the cast of an old television show that suddenly developed a new life in reruns. Among them are moderate Republicans like Mr. Scowcroft and Mr. Baker who worked for the president’s father, including those who regarded Iraq as a “war of choice” that distracted the United States from bigger terrorist threats.
Mr. Scowcroft, who was a mentor to Mr. Gates and to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was traveling out of the country and could not be reached. But one of Mr. Scowcroft’s business partners, Arnold Kanter, a top State Department official when Mr. Bush’s father was president, said he expected that Mr. Gates would “take a thoroughly pragmatic approach to finding an Iraq solution.”
Mr. Gates, he said, “is poised to be George W. Bush’s Clark Clifford.” It was a reference to the elder statesman whom President Johnson tapped in 1968 to succeed Robert S. McNamara, the polarizing figure who became the face of a failed war.
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