The NeoCons resent Gates because he served in the Iraq Study Group and was a symbol of their fall from power.
Some of those NeoCons blame Gates for Bush abandoning Scooter to die on the political battlefield.
However all that played out, the Realists are running foreign policy now.
Rumsfeld seemed great for a few years, but clearly didn't do a good job with Iraq. We had a masterful plan for defeating the Iraqi army and taking Baghdad, but didn't have solid planing in place for what to do afterward.
I don't recall the Iraq study group offering up a winning strategy on Iraq either. Wasn't Petraeus responsible for the strategy of "The Surge"?
I'm not so sure I would refer to 0bama, Hillary, Richard Holbrooke, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the rest of the liberals at the State Department as "Realists" when it comes to foreign policy. Was that sarcasm?