Rumsfeld Out, Gates In at DOD

In a move that is clearly too little too late, Bush accepts Rumsfeld resignation. I'm sure many Republican Congressmen are wailing and gnashing their teeth at the move. The timing betrays the intransigence that is represented in this President. As washingtonpost.com quotes former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta.

The fact that the defense chief lasted so long in the job was essentially a reflection of the fact that, in firing Rumsfeld, "you are basically admitting you made some serious mistakes in the conduct of the war.

The selection of Gates signals that Bush has relented to the style of quiet pragmatic and cautious diplomacy that reflected his father's tenure in the White House.
New York Times

In choosing Robert M. Gates as his next defense secretary, President Bush reached back to an earlier era in Republican foreign policy, one marked more by caution and pragmatism than that of the neoconservatives who have shaped the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and confrontations with Iran and North Korea.


Soft-spoken but tough-minded, Mr. Gates, 63, is in many ways the antithesis of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the brash leader he would replace. He has been privately critical of the administration’s failure to execute its military and political plans for Iraq, and he has spent the last six months quietly debating new approaches to the war, as a member of the Iraq Study Group run by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton.


A hint of the approach Mr. Gates might bring to the job, drawing on his experience at the end of the cold war, can be found in his remarks in 2004 at the release of the Council on Foreign Relations report, called “Iran: Time for a New Approach.”


“One of our recommendations is that the U.S. government lift its ban in terms of nongovernmental organizations being able to operate in Iran,” Mr. Gates said. “Greater interaction between Iranians and the rest of the world,” he said, “sets the stage for the kind of internal change that we all hope will happen there.”