Defense Secretary Gates, talking with reporters on the plane as he returned to Washington, was gloomy (the New York Times calls him "blunt") about political developments in Iraq.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today that he was discouraged by the departure of the major Sunni Arab bloc from Iraq’s coalition government, and noted that the Bush administration may have misjudged the difficulty of achieving reconciliation among Iraq’s sectarian factions.
In one of his bluntest assessments of the progress of the administration’s Iraq strategy, Mr. Gates said: “I think the developments on political side are somewhat discouraging at the national level. And clearly the withdrawal of the Sunnis from the government is discouraging. My hope is that it can all be patched back together.”
He described the "improving" security situation as a kind of offset. Improving? Really? I'm transcribing an interview with Washington Post national security reporter, Thomas Ricks who, along with some members of the military currently serving in Iraq, paints quite a different picture. More on that tomorrow...
