Gates Hearing Has New Urgency

By Robert Parry
December 3, 2006

George W. Bush’s back-of-the-hand to the Baker-Hamilton commission’s Iraq War troop drawdown plan – and the disclosure that Bush ousted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after he sought a major shift in war policy – has given new urgency to the Dec. 5 hearings on Robert M. Gates to be Bush’s new Pentagon chief.

Senators, who were inclined to rubber-stamp Gates’s nomination, may have reason to think twice. Indeed, the evidence now suggests that Washington’s conventional wisdom about Gates as “a realist” clambering onboard to put Bush’s war strategy on a new course was dead wrong. Rather than a sign of a new direction, Bush may have picked Gates as a yes man who will continue the war pretty much as is.