(SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON - When Robert M. Gates was sworn in to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, President Bush said he was counting on his new Pentagon chief to "forge a new way forward in Iraq."
But in the year since he was hired to reverse US fortunes there - advocating a military "surge" that by most accounts has reaped significant dividends - the unassuming former CIA director and confidant of the president's father, George H.W. Bush, has also been undertaking a much broader mission.
Gates, 64, in an alliance with his former aide, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has helped to roll back some of the most hawkish stances of the first six years of the Bush presidency - on the use of torture, US-Iranian relations, and the policy of preemptive war that Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others espoused, according to interviews with current and former administration officials and private analysts.
Gates's influence has brought the president's foreign policy more in line with that of the elder Bush, steering the administration toward a more traditional model of coalition-building and advocating military force as a last resort, they said.
"What you have is a change in the climate around the president," said Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser for the first President Bush, when Gates served as his deputy and Rice oversaw Soviet affairs.
Given his background as a former CIA analyst and president of a major university, Gates has a "different kind of personality and outlook" than his highly ideological predecessor, Scowcroft said. Gates's influence has helped replace the "formidable pressure" exerted on the president by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative allies with "a much more nuanced foreign policy."
For example, top national security officials clashed with Congress and human rights advocates over their refusal to rule out "waterboarding," an interrogation technique that involves simulated drowning and is deemed torture by the Geneva Conventions.
But when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff equivocated in November when asked whether he considered waterboarding to be torture, Gates cut him off. "No member of the US military is allowed to do it, period," Gates said.
Besides railing against torture as an interrogation tactic in the war on terror, Gates has advocated closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, which he believes has sullied America's reputation.
He has successfully pushed the administration to engage Iran to help improve security in Iraq, over the objections of Cheney. Breaking with Rumsfeld, Gates also negotiated with Russian officials to assuage their anger over a US plan to erect an antimissile system in Eastern Europe.
Then in late November, Gates surprised the Washington establishment by advocating a major increase in the State Department's budget, saying the United States "must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military."
Scowcroft, a close friend of Gates, said Gates considers the speech at Kansas State University to be among his proudest moments as defense secretary. It was also a break from Rumsfeld and signaled that Gates believes the military should not be the primary tool of American foreign policy.
"There is no more talk about spreading democracy" by force, said Joseph Nye, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration who teaches at Harvard University. "Bob is a very practical, sensible person. I think they would have been a lot better off if he had been the defense secretary in 2001."
Nye recalled how Rumsfeld was dismissive of "soft power" - the use of diplomacy and other noncoercive means to influence adversaries. Asked about soft power at a 2003 Army conference, Rumsfeld replied, "I don't know what it means," Nye recalled.
At Kansas State four years later, Gates declared, "I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use soft power" and advocated "a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security" like diplomacy, economic aid, and cultural exchanges.
"What better illustration can you have of the differences" between Gates and Rumsfeld, Nye said.
While Gates is hailed as a breath of fresh air, critics say he is still presiding over a widely unpopular war in Iraq.
Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, believes Gates's heavy focus on Iraq has come at the expense of the war in Afghanistan, where violence is up and insurgents are making gains on coalition forces.
"In Afghanistan, Gates's record is mixed," O'Hanlon said.
Nevertheless, Gates has won high marks from lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill.
Most Democrats and Republicans hail his efforts to reach out to both parties and to allies around the world, and to restore the government's credibility.
"He has been very straightforward," said Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. "He gives us periodic briefings on the situation in the Middle East that he pledged he would do. He told us at his confirmation hearing that he would not mislead us and has lived up to it."
In the Bush Cabinet, Gates has found an intellectual soul mate in Rice, a former university administrator, according to those knowledgeable about the administration's internal deliberations.
Gates "allows Condi to expand more in her areas when she couldn't before, when she got slapped down every time she moved," Scowcroft said.
Meanwhile, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, another member of the elder Bush's inner circle, is also considered close to Gates. Baker was one of the key moderate voices that helped the first President Bush build an international coalition in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf war and was among those who warned against invading Iraq in 2003 without United Nations backing.
"There is a sense that the system is working again," said John Hamre, former deputy secretary of defense in the Clinton administration and recently picked by Gates to head the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee.
"The system had broken down rather badly, and there is a feeling that things are back to a regular order," Hamre said.
Gates's stewardship could help salvage the president's foreign affairs legacy.
"Robert Gates is a bipartisan moderate rather than a highly partisan hard-liner," said Loren Thompson, president of the Lexington Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank specializing in defense policy. "He is nobody's idea of a liberal, but he knows how to make a government of divided parties and diverse viewpoints work. Bush has been dragged back to the center by Gates."
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
