The Gates Keeper

A former top national-security official (who asked to remain anonymous discussing the Bush-Gates relationship) says: "Can the president make it [an attack on Iran] happen? Yes. Can it happen quietly and secretly? No. And it wouldn't. The president is not a dummy. If he had the Defense secretary he had in 2001, it would be easy. Rumsfeld would have just said, 'Yes.' But Bush can't do anything over the opposition of the secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Gates is no greenhorn on Iran. During the Iran-contra scandal of the late '80s, Gates, then a senior CIA official, was accused by hard-liners of exaggerating the influence of moderates in Tehran. In 2004, he coauthored a Council on Foreign Relations report calling for a diplomatic, not a military, approach to Iran. Since then, his views on Iran have hardened a bit; still, there is some evidence to suggest that the administration did not know what it was getting with Gates. Former Carter national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told NEWSWEEK that when Rumsfeld resigned right after the 2006 election, Bush's national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, called Brzezinski to tell him that Gates was taking over at the Pentagon. Brzezinski reminded Hadley that Gates had coauthored a report on Iran. There was a long silence. "What report on Iran?" Hadley finally asked. (Hadley did not respond to requests for comment.)

Gates was picked largely to help fix Iraq and salvage the military, not to bomb Iran. The senior uniformed military view him rather the way settlers in wagon trains viewed the cavalry after an Indian attack. "He could have been Satan, as long as he wasn't Rumsfeld," says the former top national-security official. "They love him at the Pentagon." Gates's management style is diametrically opposed to Rumsfeld's. "Rummy always kept people guessing. You never know what he was doing. Gates is the opposite. He's open and methodical. He tries to build confidence and loyalty." For all Rumsfeld's bluster, he could be oddly indecisive, endlessly circling problems with "360-degree reviews," as they were called. Gates, by contrast, will impose tight deadlines to make sure that decisions get made before incessant rethinking can water down the outcome. (Larry Di Rita, Rumsfeld's former spokesman, says that his old boss sought to be a "transformative" Defense secretary who made some people uncomfortable with the pace and intensity of change.)

Rumsfeld did not disguise his disdain for "nation building," the slow, murky process of winning hearts and minds in unconventional wars. ("What is the difference between hard power and soft power?" he asked at a 2003 conference.) Gates, on the other hand, last week gave a speech in which he came out squarely for soft power—a term coined by a Democrat, Joseph Nye, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council in the Clinton administration. "One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military-service success is not sufficient to win," Gates told an audience in Kansas City. He cited the need for economic development, police training, institution building and the rule of law, and providing basic services, among other nonviolent tools. "Success will be less a matter of imposing one's will and more a function of shaping behavior," he concluded.

More astonishing to veterans of the political wars on Capitol Hill, he called for more spending for the State Department—to hire more diplomats and aid workers. "It was vintage Gates," says Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, a longtime national-security expert on the Hill. "In the history of the republic, I don't know of any other incident when cabinet secretary A argued that cabinet secretary B needed a bigger budget." She finds Gates's disinterested open-mindedness so remarkable coming from an administration known for its partisan zeal that she says, "I wonder if they knew what they were buying."

Some old Pentagon bulls are not keen about fighting future wars in unconventional ways. They have no taste for waging counterinsurgencies with no front lines or clear-cut distinctions between civilians and soldiers. "There are some in the military who are hoping that this new warfare is a kind of one-off event, and that they can go back to planning for large wars with nation-states," says Senator Bayh. "But I think Bob Gates understands that we are likely to continue to face irregular warfare and need counterinsurgency thinking for some time." Sen. Jack Reed, West Point '71, warns that in the wake of defeat in Vietnam, the Army simply tried to forget about fighting guerrilla wars. He fears the same could happen today, that the generals will say, "Let's get back to what we're good at doing," i.e., fighting straight-ahead battles with tanks and artillery.