WHAT HATH GATES WROUGHT?

In addition to getting rid of that partisan fool Gen. Pace, Gates is sweeping out the neo-con fanatics in the DoD and appointing non-ideological flag officers, such as Adm. Fallon, to command positions. A good question is what persuaded Pres. Fredo to nominate a SECDEF who was part of the original Iraq Study Group and did not share Fredo's "vision" of the Middle East?

New military leaders question Iraq mission
By Nancy A. Youssef and Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Thursday, October 4, 2007

WASHINGTON — Four and a half years after the nation's top military leaders saluted and fell in behind President Bush's pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, their replacements are beginning to question the mission and sound alarms about the toll the war is taking on the Army and the Marine Corps.

The change at the Pentagon is striking but little-noticed, in part because Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a longtime veteran of the CIA, is quiet where his predecessor Donald H. Rumsfeld was not.

"It's part of a sea change," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a national-security research center in Washington. "The ideologues have been replaced by managers who view Iraq not as a cause, but a problem to be solved."

Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, Undersecretary for Intelligence Gen. James Clapper and other top officials also are concerned that the war may be crippling the military's ability to respond to other crises.

Although Democrats in Congress have been powerless to halt or even slow the war, six developments have combined to produce growing resistance, even within some parts of Bush's own administration, to the president's unrelenting emphasis on staying the course in Iraq:

3. A shift, completed this week, in the military's top uniformed leadership from administration loyalists to officers who are more concerned about the growing strains on the military.

4. Mounting evidence, in a variety of official reports in recent weeks, that Iraqi forces won't be prepared to take over from American troops in significant numbers until late next year at the earliest, and that Iraqis have made little progress toward political reconciliation.

The outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, a loyal advocate for administration policies, used the word "freedom" eight times in his final remarks as chairman. Mullen didn't use it once in his first speech Monday as the new chairman.

After Mullen was sworn in, he sent a letter to the military that spelled out a vision of the Middle East markedly different from the one the administration has hailed. Mullen didn't talk about how the two wars could spread democracy and freedom in the region, as Pace did until the final minutes of his two-year tenure as chairman.