I have now read the Robert Gates book Duty. Gates is the Secretary of Defense who served under both Bush 43 and Obama.
I see a great deal in the book that is not mentioned in any of the reviews, so far.
For example Bush 43, as Gates refers to him, because Gates was the CIA director under Bush 41, was the best friend the Jews and Israelis have had since Cyrus the Great, the Persian ruler 2.5 millennia ago. There were people around Bush 43 who did not agree with him on the issue of Israel but Bush was a very strong man and very determined. All of this was visible to people outside D.C.
The other things that Gates supports is that Bush 43 was warm, generous, kind and a superb manager. He was decisive and able to ignore the vicious world of tirades and hostility direct at him from the press and Democrats. He had many good friends around the world.
Bush was surrounded by experienced and wise advisors. That included Gates himself after Bush changed his strategy in Iraq and let Rumsfeld leave.
Some of what I've read in the book is between the lines and is not explicitly stated.
Obama, his cabinet and the sycophants around him in the White House hate Israel. Some of this was public early on. Gates goes out of his way to falsely claim, in gratuitously inserted paragraphs (that he didn’t write), that these Obama people, including himself are sympathetic to Israel. The hatred of Israel and strong antagonism never subsided despite some military equipment support.
None of Bush’s positive qualities can be found in Barack Obama. Gates, after a life in government, got along well with Obama and agreed with Obama in the early part of his service particularly in the drawdown of troops in Iraq and the build up in Afghanistan. Obama rarely lost his temper in the first few years working on defense issues. Gates takes credit for a superb and aggressive termination of 30 programs in the Defense Department that he didn't feel had a future. Obama was delighted to cut the Defense budget. Gates was probably right. Defense is bloated, stuck with Congressional pork and unable to adjust to the changing strategic world.
Obama began his administration surrounded by political activists completely ignorant of government or administrative functions. They never got any better. They meddled in every department without any understanding or comprehension of their ignorance or the damage they were doing.
For the first few years of Obama's term the White House spent every waking minute bitching and moaning about how much they hated Bush 43. Very juvenile, very irresponsible and it reflected the mindset of Obama as a political ideologue.
Obama appears to be a man of boundless self-confidence, who is vicious and mean-spirited. Obama seeks revenge against political opponents and people who disagree with him. His policy concerns are invariably focused on politics and reelection…. often to the detriment of the nation.
There were several semi-secret details that seem to have leaked out in the book. First, our mobile antimissile defense system the SM-3 is highly functional. It works. Also called the Aegis. This was not true of many of the early antimissile systems. The tactical problem is that it would take three SM-3s to bring down an entering warhead. So a launch of only a dozen enemy missiles would not be completely stopped.
I have long suspected that the Pakistani and North Korean nuclear weapons are a fiction and the tests carried out were nothing but underground explosives. Gates makes it clear that the North Korean nuclear weapons test failed.
I have commented here that the bomber based laser defense system was canceled because it was not rechargeable rapidly. Gates says the problem was that it would only work up to 50 miles in the atmosphere. That exposed the weapon to dangerous enemy countermeasures.
Lastly, I was surprised to find that a status of forces agreement was put in place in Iraq from 2008 to 2011. Obama and Biden made a weak effort to extend it. We don't have one now to our great detriment.
Throughout the book Biden is characterized as a charming, humorous, completely incompetent boob who is on the wrong side of every policy and international issue. Biden is perversely determined, even after being overruled by Obama, to persist in pushing his point. He lies without hesitation or qualms.
The biggest take away from Gates' book is that Obama and his acolytes in the White House form a very closed insular circle who meddle in every single governmental decision and policy. Obama consistently lies with a straight face when he says he didn't know about any IRS, FBI, Justice Department or Health Department program. He never stops meddling with the details of everything that is going on.
Thank you Mr. Gates.