Robert Gates: The Perfect Choice For Bush's Purposes

Oh yeah, this is just the guy needed. Watch out Iran. Feeling the laser sights yet, Ahmadinejad?

The man nominated by President George W. Bush to be the next US secretary of defense recommended in the 1980s overt military action against Nicaragua, including air strikes and a naval quarantine of its ports, according to a document made public here.

Former top US spymaster Robert Gates outlines these proposals -- and his general views on confronting threats around the world -- in a December 14, 1984, memorandum to his boss, then-Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey, that was released Friday by the National Security Archives.

Gates was tapped by Bush to replace outgoing defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the wake of the November 7 midterm election, in which Republicans, facing voter discontent over the war in Iraq, lost control of Congress to their Democratic rivals.

The president has described his defense secretary pick as "an agent of change" at the Pentagon. But the declassified memorandum showed Gates to be a proponent of a no-holds-barred approach to foreign policy, an advocate of covert and overt military action with little appetite for diplomatic niceties.

The document begins with a bitter overview of US foreign policy setbacks in Cuba, Vietnam and Angola and conplains that "half measures, half-heartedly applied, will have the same result in Nicaragua."

Acknowledging the covert US aid to Nicaraguan "contras" was not having the desired effect, Gates writes that the US goal should now be "overtly to try to bring down the regime" led at the time by Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega.

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