[LibFreeOrDie]

Already, Gates is on record urging direct negotiations with Iran in the impasse over nuclear capability. It will be no surprise if these discussions are widened to include the future of Iraq, at which point the exit strategy really will be under way. The mullahs in Tehran can be confident from past history that Mr Gates knows how to get in touch with them.

AP is reporting today that Tony Blair will be urging Bush to negotiate with Iran, too. Seems the script is already written...

[Col. Bob]

Title correction.

A man that Iran's mullahs can work [Ayatollah Gates]

[Tailgunner Joe]

The Sandinistas had prevailed because the Somoza regime, propped up for 50 years by Washington, had been so utterly corrupt.

Uh, no. The Sandinistas prevailed because our ally Somoza was betrayed by Jimmy Carter, the same man responsible for stabbing the Shah in the back and losing Iran to the Ayatollahs.

[AliVeritas]

Psst. Remember this? Guess whose files were missing a la Clinton 1996...

White House Collected Many More Confidential Files
http://www-cgi.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/news/9606/26/fbi.files/

[KeyLargo]

Looks to me like Gates was brought in to start the cut and run process.

Seminal moments of irrational exuberance
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/will/132338,CST-EDT-GEO12.article)

November 12, 2006

BY GEORGE WILL

".........Rumsfeld's replacement, Robert Gates, by virtue of his service on the Iraq Study Group chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, is already immersed in the agonizing choices that must be made. And having been deputy national security adviser in 1991, Gates knows why the first President Bush declined to extend Operation Desert Storm beyond the liberation of Kuwait to regime change in Baghdad...."

"Gates, who was there when the questions were asked, seems to be of the realist school, reluctant to engage in regime change as a prelude to nation-building. And we may hope that as director of the CIA he learned the most important thing a government can know: what it is that it doesn't know. Such knowledge inoculates governments against irrational exuberance...."