In Gates Selection, White House Hopes to Close Rift Between State and Defense

From The New York Times:

President Bush selected Robert M. Gates as his new defense secretary in part to close a long-running rift between the Defense Department and the State Department that has hobbled progress on Iraq, keeping the two agencies at odds on issues ranging from reconstruction to detaining terrorism suspects, according to White House officials and members of Mr. Gates’s inner circle.

While Mr. Gates, a former director of central intelligence, had long been considered for a variety of roles, over the past two months Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, quietly steered the White House toward replacing Donald H. Rumsfeld with Mr. Gates, who had worked closely with Ms. Rice under the first President Bush. One senior participant in those discussions, who declined to be identified by name while talking about internal deliberations, said, “everyone realizes that we don’t have much time to get this right” and the first step is to get “everyone driving on the same track.”

The question now is whether it is simply too late to achieve President Bush’s goal of a stable and democratic Iraq, even if Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice are able to work together as smoothly in altering policy as they did 15 years ago on a very different kind of problem, managing the American response to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

A few members of the Iraq Study Group — the commission created in March at the urging of members of Congress and led by James A. Baker III, from which Mr. Gates stepped down on Friday — have wondered aloud in recent days whether the insurgency and sectarian conflict in Iraq may be too far advanced to reverse.

[It is not] clear how Mr. Gates will deal with Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Cheney worked for years to protect Mr. Rumsfeld, who had hired him for his first government job, and the top echelons of the Defense Department have been peppered with Cheney protégés. Many of them have told associates they expect to be leaving, as Mr. Gates takes over with a mandate, in Mr. Bush’s words, to approach the job with “fresh eyes.”

[T]ogether with Ms. Rice, Mr. Gates is expected to have to put into action recommendations by the study group that are likely to call for initiatives involving European allies and Iraq’s neighbors in the Middle East. The new plans are expected to mix diplomacy, the training of Iraqi troops and the use of American force to quell the violence in Baghdad, and to require close coordination between the Departments of State and Defense.