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The only military issue he did care about was gays in the military. And that’s according to his own Secretary of Defense.(Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates sharply questions President Obama’s “passion” for military matters in his forthcoming memoir, and claims that practically the only time he saw that in the president was during his push to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.”)
“One quality I missed in Obama was passion, especially when it came to the two wars,” Gates wrote. “In my presence, Bush — very unlike his father — was pretty unsentimental. But he was passionate about the war in Iraq; on occasion, at a Medal of Honor ceremony or the like, I would see his eyes well up. I worked for Obama longer than Bush, and I never saw his eyes well up.”Gates went on to suggest that the president was far more emotional about repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” — the policy barring openly gay people from serving in the military.He wrote that “the only military matter, apart from leaks, about which I ever sensed deep passion on his part was ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ For him, changing the law seemed to be the inevitable next step in the civil rights movement.”Gates went on to write about how he believes that the president cares about the troops, but over the next few years gave few public speeches about the stakes in Afghanistan and did not show the troops he was really in the fight to win.“Given his campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan, I think I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him,” Gates wrote.
If only Obama had been told that the Taliban stone gays to death, he might have been in it to win it.
