Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates opened his keynote speech at the TD Ameritrade annual conference Thursday in Orlando with a series of rapid-fire one-liners worthy of Henny Youngman. The target? Inside-the-Beltway Washington politics.
“It’s a pleasure to be here in Orlando,” Gates, whose long D.C. tenure includes a stint as CIA director from which he retired in 1993, said. “Actually it’s a pleasure to be anywhere but Washington, D.C.”
He then quoted President John F. Kennedy by saying, “It’s a city of southern efficiency and northern charm.”
“Politicians have biblical levels of self-regard,” he continued. “People there are always lost in thought because it’s such unfamiliar territory. They walk down Lovers’ Lane holding their own hand. They say they’ll double cross that bridge when they come to it.’”
His obvious disdain for the powerbroker political elite then took a serious turn. Calling himself the “Eeyore of the national security community,” he identified a number of foreign-policy hotspots that clearly have him worried.
“Our focus is usually on the daily headlines in the U.S.,” he said. “But as we do that, the world marches on.”
When Gates retired in 1993, the United States had just won the Cold War and was the only remaining super power. Regulators had just cleaned up the savings and loan crisis and the country was on a sustained path of economic growth that culminated in a budget surplus by the end of the decade.
But there were foreign policy warnings of bigger challenges to come, Gates said. Resentment and chaos in Russia led future Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to remark that the fall of the Soviet Union was the worst event of the 20th century. China saw the Soviet Union’s collapse as an opportunity to uncover and exploit our military weaknesses. And there were the first attacks by al-Qaida on the World Trade Center, as well as American embassies in Africa.
“The death of Osama bin Laden was obviously a great victory in the war on terror,” Gates said. “Al-Qaida is now on its heels. But what we’re seeing now are more attacks by disaffected young men both here and abroad, as the Ft. Hood shooter illustrates.”
We’ve been lucky, Gates added, because a number of attacks have failed recently, that, had they been successful, could have done great damage.
“We can no more eliminate the risk of terror that we can eliminate crime,” he said. “We can reduce the risk, but not completely eliminate, especially in a free and open society of 300 million people. What we must do is fight the battle on their 10-yard line, not our 10-yard line, or worse, our end zone.”
The war in Afghanistan was critical to reducing the threat of terrorism, but Gates lamented the “divergence of resources to Iraq in 2003” which he said “clearly hurt” the effort.
“Despite the frustration over Afghanistan, that cannot lead to a premature exit,” he said.
He then took on the issue of America’s relationship with Pakistan, which he also called frustrating, especially in light of the fact that after the death of bin Laden, the investigations were not into who might have assisted bin Laden in “hiding in plain sight,” but rather on who might have helped the Navy Seals with intelligence gathering.
“There is a deficit of trust in that relationship, but we should not abandon it,” he said.