Story Summary

January 13, 2014 12:48 AM
By David Ignatius
The Daily Star

Reading the devastating memoir by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, people are likely to ask the same troubling questions that emerge from the morning newspapers these days: How did the Obama administration’s foreign-policy process get so broken, and how can it be put back together? Gates’ book certainly helps answer the first riddle.

The president felt jammed by the military into the surge policy, and the White House has seemed to regret it ever since.

Afghanistan has badly damaged Obama and his team.

Gates is brutally honest about his former colleagues.

Perhaps the answer is the same as to why Obama stuck with the policy he doubted: War sometimes doesn’t allow clean options, all-in or all-out.

At the center of this process was Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, disliked by Gates as a political commissar but effective at maintaining order among a team whose members, as Gates makes clear, were often seething.

Read more: http://dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2014/Jan-13/243746-only-obama-can-fix-a-broken-us-foreign-policy-process.ashx#ixzz2qGZGusQT
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