Robert Gates, the CliffsNotes version

This week, former secretary of defense Robert Gates released a long and weirdly candid book on his years in that unpleasant job. His narrative is, how does one put this gently, uneven: long stretches of incisive analysis mixed evenly with tantrums about his enemies, who were all mean and dumb on the playground. Like anyone writing about recent events in his life, Gates hasn’t fully digested his own story, and the even pages sometimes contradict the odd ones right next door. Sometimes he manages to skip a whole page before making a reader wonder if he notices what he’s writing.

And then here he is all the way over on page nineteen, quoting the statement he made to Sen. Ted Kennedy at the same hearing: “Senator, I am not giving up the presidency of Texas A&M . . . to come back to Washington and be a bump on a log and not say exactly what I think, and to speak candidly and, frankly, boldly to people at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue about what I believe and what I think needs to be done.”

I’ve been trying to mark every passage in the book that disproves the latter statement, but my pen is drying out.

Still, for all the reasonably predictable pettiness of a Washington memoir, for all the half-considered argument and first draft description, Gates is really up to something, here. His assessment of the war in Iraq is quietly and consistently damning; he writes as a man who, to use the appropriate military terminology, found himself trying to unfuck a shit sandwich. “We are where we are,” he tells senators, rallying support for a continued war. It’s almost as if he felt doubt.

No one much wanted to help with that grimly marketed task. In an early meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of the chiefs expressed frank concern that the war was destroying the military. “Not one uttered a single sentence on the need for us to win in Iraq,” Gates writes, leaving unstated the reality that none probably thought it was a possibility by that point. Later, trying to corral a general to serve as a “coordinator and facilitator” for the management of the wars from the White House, Stephen Hadley, national security advisor, “offered the job to several retired military officers. All of them turned him down, one saying publicly that the White House didn’t know what it was doing in Iraq.” Gates is describing a war that was orphaned from its own military, sitting out on the doorstep in the cold.

This is the darkest assessment of the Iraq War we’ve seen from a senior Bush administration official, and the darkness is painted in fine detail. That dark narrative includes a bleak depiction of congressional Republicans, men and women shouting private doubts behind their insane public cheerleading act. It’s weirdly reassuring to read that public figures are less dumb in private. Except maybe Steve King and Rick Santorum, because let’s not get carried away here.

Beyond that, Gates is offering a whole series of reasonable observations about institutional culture and deeply rooted bad policy: the insularity of senior military officers, the unnecessary cost and complexity of the massive American military, the dysfunction of a Pentagon bureaucracy that can barely be charted, and on and on. He is, for a solid sixty percent of his narrative, trying to figure out and explain, as someone who lived inside a thing, why the thing works so badly. He’s an interesting man with an interesting mind, doing something interesting.

What we get from all of that is a long series of stories about how President Obama felt doubt, failing to win the wars by feeling more winningish. The disconnect between the flawed honesty of the book and the complete valuelessness of the news stories can’t be exaggerated; nor can the thematic unanimity, as if every reporter and editor on the planet has been trained to speak in precisely the same voice about precisely the same thing.

The disconnect between the book and its thirdhand audience, who consume the “book” only through its description by reporters who spent ten minutes flipping between the index and the text? Truly awe-inspring. As the Huffington Post and the Daily Caller compete to see which can become the flat-out stupidest new media outlet in the country, fighting for the readership that finds Sean Hannity and Ed Schultz too subtle to comprehend, their audience barks its viewpoint in comments that would embarrass a spambot. They are participating, you see, in democracy.

Washington memoirists, save yourself all the extra steps. Take only the very dumbest thought you have about your years in government, type it up, and then cross out half the words and write either “KOCH BROTHERS TEABAGGER FOX NEWS” or “RADICAL COMMUNIST RELEASE THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE.” Burn everything else in your fireplace. The final result will be the same, and think of all the paper we’ll save.