Hillary Rodham Clinton, a likely Democratic Party standard-bearer in the 2016 presidential contest, staked out her military-related positions in the 2008 race based on how they would play politically, according to a former secretary of defense who served in both the Obama and Bush administrations. Describing a 'remarkable' exchange he witnessed, Robert Gates writes in a book due out next week that 'Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary.' Obama, too, 'conceded vaguely that [his] opposition to the Iraq surge had been political,' Gates recounts. 'To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.'
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Robert Gates, secretary of defense under Barack Obama and George W. Bush, writes that Hillary Clinton made a callous political move in 2006
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She announced her opposition to Bush's Iraq troop 'surge' just before entering the presidential race
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Gates writes that she admitted making that choice in order to avoid being politically outflanked by Obama as they entered the 2007 primary season
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The revelation could prove problematic for Clinton as she prepares what political observers see as a second run at the White House in 2016
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The former defense secretary says Obama believed his own troop surge – the move of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan – would fail
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He also attacked VP Joe Biden, saying he 'has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue'
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The White House responded, saying Obama 'disagrees with Secretary Gates' assessment' and defending Biden as a 'leading statesman'
The @placeholder administration hold-over reveals in his memoir that he was 'deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation – from the top down – of the uncertainties and unpredictability of war.'
'The controlling nature of the Obama @placeholder,' says Gates, 'and its determination to take credit for every good thing that happened while giving none to the career folks in the trenches who had actually done the work, offended Secretary Clinton as much as it did me.'