The straight-talking new Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, is already proving quite a contrast to his deft, if somewhat bureaucratic, wordsmith of a predecessor, Robert Gates. How could the practiced former California pol and former senior White House official, now emerging from the shadows of the CIA, have let the following phrase escape from his lips as he did on July 11:
"The reason you guys are here," he told soldiers at Camp Victory, outside Baghdad, "is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked... and 3,000 Americans... got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we've been fighting because of that."
It is tempting to call this rationale disingenuous but we will call it merely dubious. We would have thought that the effort to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda was a relic of the administration of George W. Bush, the centerpiece of which was the fictitious meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence officer and Mohammed al-Atta, the team leader of the 9/11 attackers.
In fairness, Panetta half-corrected himself when pressed afterwards by reporters. Here is Mr. Panetta back-pedaling into history:
I wasn't saying, you know, the invasion -- or going into the issues or the justification of that. It was more the fact that we really had to deal with al-Qaeda here, they developed a presence here, and that tied in.
Two days earlier, on July 9 in Kabul, Panetta allowed as how 70,000 American troops would remain in Afghanistan through the end of 2014. In contrast, President Obama had stated that the American troop presence would be down to 68,000 by September 2012, and an unspecified further number would be withdrawn by 2014,
The bland Mr. Gates could be both suave and blunt. For Mr. Panetta, the complications of Beltway politics, which he has apparently mastered, are proving to be quite different from those of the daunting "Greater Middle East."
Charles Cogan was the chief of the Near East-South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA from August 1979 to August 1984. It was this Division that directed the covert action operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He is now a historian and an associate of the Belfer Center's International Security Program at Harvard University's Kennedy School.