Options for the New Secretary of Defense

Bob Gates is all things to all people in Washington these days. To the hard-liners who want to preserve what's left of George W. Bush's policy in Iraq, Gates is an ardent patriot, a determined anticommunist who thought the Soviet Union was an evil empire, who backed aggressive measures against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the early 1980s--and who during the first Bush Administration sided most often with a Defense Secretary named Dick Cheney.

To the new realists, who want to tear up this Administration's failing bid to bring democracy to Iraq and replace it with a strategy for an exit, Gates is a secret ally, an agent of change who rocked the CIA he grew up in by shifting it out of covert action and into open-source programs at the cold war's end--and then became a reformist president of Texas A&M, tossing a beloved football coach and reducing admissions.

If Gates had been talking to reporters instead of preparing for his confirmation hearings next week to become Secretary of Defense, he would have found all this amusing, if not absurd. The man with the Kansas-flat voice and a weakness for hiking, hayrides and roller coasters would have got a kick out of saying that both sides are right--and that absolutely none of it matters.

That would be the analyst in Gates talking, the man who developed a reputation during more than 25 years at the CIA and White House for making cold calculations not only about the intelligence he was poring over but also about how to choose his allies as he zipped to the top ranks of the CIA in record time. Now in a late-inning gig that no one expected--least of all Gates--he is about to take over the Pentagon and the day-to-day responsibilities for a war gone bad. He brings to the task one advantage: he was a key member of the special commission headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana Representative Lee Hamilton that has been cooking up options for what to do next. Gates was involved in the military end of the commission's work--which means, says a colleague, that "not only will he understand the proposals, he will know the origins of them."

The problem facing Gates is that the options being considered may already be obsolete. The conditions on the ground in Iraq are deteriorating so rapidly that even the Baker commission is struggling to keep up, several well-placed national-security sources told TIME. October was the deadliest month yet for Iraqi civilians since the start of the war, and November seems destined to surpass it. A Thanksgiving Day onslaught by Sunni militants killed more than 200 Iraqis, wounded hundreds and spurred a round of Shi'ite reprisals. As the Iraqi capital erupted in another frenzy of sectarian violence, the U.S. lost eight service members in a span of six days, bringing its death toll to nearly 2,900.