Searching for an Iraq Exit Strategy

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Having worked at the White House and run the CIA, Gates will manage the budgets, bureaucrats, jargon and generals on the Pentagon's E-Ring easily enough. But he will be judged by only one rule: whether he can organize what a Baker aide calls "the orderly transition and exit from Iraq." Someone who has worked with him describes Gates as "serious, subtle, reflective, never curt or abrupt." Departing CIA directors are flooded with offers of corporate jobs and strategic intelligence posts. Instead, when Gates left government in early 1993, he fled to Washington State, where he spent the next few years in a library working on his memoirs.

That was, in many ways, a return to where he started. He rose through the CIA's analysis directorate as a Russia scholar during the 1970s until plucked for stardom by Reagan spymaster William Casey. Gates had a reputation as a tough-nosed hard-liner; in fact, Gates was never a mirror image of the shrewdly moderate Baker. During the first Bush Administration, Gates was far more skeptical of Mikhail Gorbachev and his perestroika program than was either Baker or the President. Gates' closest ally in that minor crusade was none other than then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Gates' nickname in the first Bush White House was Eyeore: no matter the topic, he always seemed to worry about the worst-case scenario. Gates, who has a healthy sense of humor, was usually the first to admit he was the in-house pessimist.

He has also seen his share of controversy. Partly because he worked for Casey, Gates was a minor player in the Iran-contra scandal and was criticized for skewing intelligence analysis on the Soviets to suit hard-liners in the Reagan White House. More than 30 Democrats--10 of whom are still in the Senate--opposed his nomination to be CIA director in 1991. Gates went into his confirmation that year carrying a small, white oblong stone in his pocket, a memento of a hike he had taken in the Olympic mountains the summer before. He wanted a reminder of what he had to look forward to in case his nomination failed. He may want to dig that stone out of his closet. Given the current Administration's record of laundering intelligence, Gates is sure to endure another round of questions about his past in his confirmation hearings next month.

But Bob Gates is probably under no illusions about the limitations he faces. He once told TIME that people who go to work at the White House pass through two distinct stages of astonishment. At first, they are amazed at what the place can do. But then they are quickly disillusioned by what it cannot accomplish. Putting an Iraqi exit plan in front of the President will be relatively simple. Winning Bush's full support may be harder. And executing it in a country where strategic planning is almost an oxymoron may prove beyond any man's--or any White House's--capability.