ANTI-WAR DEMOCRATS WANT NEW DEFENSE SECRETARY

Jen Dimascio has an article on Politico today about anti-war Democrats urging Obama to dump Robert Gates as Defense Secretary. I agree.

Gates has been too gung-ho over beefing up the size of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. This is a dead-end position for the United States. The U.S. will never win in Afghanistan on the basis of military force. It might prevail in helping that poor country build up its infrastructure, build sewer lines, string electric power lines, but it will never defeat Afghani insurgents and the Taliban militarily. Consider that the Afghanis have defeated every foreign invading force going back to Alexander the Great.

I admit Gates is a DefSec far superior to Donald Rumsfeld and the other neo-con hawks in the Bush/Cheney administration. For example, Gates reputedly has been one of the officials who have argued against striking Iran.

But Gates is still a believer in military might and the War in Iraq. Writes Dimascio:

"Arms control advocates and anti-war activists are ratcheting up pressure on President-elect Barack Obama to dump Defense Secretary Robert Gates and replace him with a more strident anti-war voice. . . ."

"Gates exacerbated the opposition to his retention with a recent speech at the Carnegie Foundation in which he staked out a position that made it hard for arms control advocates to back the notion of keeping him around.

"Congress last year pulled funding from studies to create a Reliable Replacement Warhead program, which would reduce and replace aging nuclear warheads in the nation’s arsenal. During the speech, Gates said the cut was misguided."