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'Bloomberg' column details former US defense secretary's feelings that Netanyahu was "impudent," unable to cope with growing Israeli isolation. Freshly retired US defense secretary Robert Gates was highly critical of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, calling him an ungrateful ally and blaming him for diplomatically isolating Israel and hurting American interests, a Bloomberg column revealed Tuesday. The criticism, reported in a piece by Jeffrey Goldberg, apparently peaked after Netanyahu met with US President Barack Obama last May, lecturing him in front of the cameras on the Israeli security situation with a level of "impudence" that shocked many in the White House,...

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates' scathing assessment of President Obama's handling of the Afghanistan war pales in comparison to what he thinks about Congress. In Gates' memoir, "Duty," which hit the bookstores on Tuesday, the former Pentagon boss puts his poison pen to the work of skewering what he calls an "incompetent" and "egotistical" institution.

Like just about everybody else in Washington and many across the country, I've been reading the excerpts from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates' book "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War." It presents a significantly more negative picture of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton than Gates' statements in office led anyone to expect. And it presents an interesting contrast with Gates' previous memoir, "From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War," published in 1996. To be sure, Gates in "Duty" says many positive things about his most recent former colleagues....

In a new memoir, former US defense secretary Robert Gates delivered bruising opinions about President Barack Obama’s leadership in the Afghanistan war. Gates said that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” In what the Washington Post called “one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat,” Gates observed that Obama was very pessimisic regarding his own strategy in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not...