Gates on Obama's handling of Iraq: 'we have to figure out what our strategy is'
By Sarah B. Boxer
In an exclusive interview with Yahoo global news anchor Katie Couric, former Defense Secretary Bob Gates sounded off for the first time about President Barack Obama’s new plan to send around 450 troops to Iraq.
“Just adding another few hundred troops doing more of the same is not likely to make much of a difference,” Gates said. “I think that we have to figure out what our strategy is. We should’ve had that strategy a year ago.”
Gates had advocated for leaving a residual force in Iraq, and has long opposed a complete U.S. troop withdrawal there.
“As long as we had a significant presence in Iraq, one of the benefits of our senior military leaders there was the ability to influence the choice of senior Iraqi leaders, and to do so on the basis of competence and their leadership capabilities,” he said.
Without that oversight, he told Couric, the military has been overtaken by incompetent and corrupt leaders.
“Part of the problem with Iraqi troops is that the training basically stopped when we left,” Gates said. “And our staying would have continued that training, for sure.”
Gates said he agrees with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s recent observation that Iraqi troops lack the will to fight the Islamic State. But, Gates added, “If you've got lousy leaders and corrupt leaders, and you haven’t been trained properly, and you’ve been fighting for over a year, I think that their behavior is more — is more understandable.”
Gates is also president of the Boy Scouts of America, and he spoke exclusively to Couric about his plan to end the ban on gay troop leaders.
Gates said that at least two states were planning to sue the Boy Scouts on the basis of employment discrimination if the ban was not overturned.
“I just felt that it was the right thing for our movement at this particular juncture,” he said.
This is not the first time Gates has supported equality for the gay community. He was in favor of repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 2010, and told Couric that he opposed discrimination against CIA applicants when he ran the agency in the early 1990s.
“There’s absolutely no reason not to treat gay applicants like we treat everybody else,” he said.
