It doesn't make sense unless Gates is prepared to accept and promote President Obama's agenda for withdrawal. And that prospect is complicated by the reality that for two more months he'll be promoting the 'agreement' the administration made with the Iraqi regime that Bush enabled into power and that Gates has worked to defend which calls for troop withdrawal by 2011 - a longer timetable for withdrawal of forces that of Obama.
Pres. Obama's Iraq position:
http://www.change.gov/agenda/iraq_agenda/"Immediately upon taking office, Obama will give his Secretary of Defense and military commanders a new mission in Iraq: ending the war. The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month -- which would remove all of them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 -- more than 7 years after the war began."
Gates, in May of this year cast the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan as the same kind of 'ideological' battle that Bush has promoted in defense of his unbridled military aggression across sovereign borders:
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=49962"Afghanistan and Iraq are the most important battlefields in the fight today, Gates said, and his priority has been “getting us to a point where our strategic objectives are within reach in those two countries.”
America’s best opportunity to discredit and deflate the extremist ideology is in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gates said.
“Just as the hollowness of communism was laid bare by the collapse of the Soviet Union, so too would success in those countries strike a decisive blow against the ideological underpinnings of extremist movements,” he said.
Obama spoke out against ideology-driven rationales for the exercise of our military forces in March in a policy speech entitled, 'The World Beyond Iraq' :
http://thepage.time.com/full-text-of-obamas-iraq-speech/"History will catalog the reasons why we waged a war that didn't need to be fought, but two stand out. In 2002, when the fateful decisions about Iraq were made, there was a President for whom ideology overrode pragmatism, and there were too many politicians in Washington who spent too little time reading the intelligence reports, and too much time reading public opinion. The lesson of Iraq is that when we are making decisions about matters as grave as war, we need a policy rooted in reason and facts, not ideology and politics," Obama said.
President-elect Obama met with Defense Sec. Gates today in an effort to pave the way for the transition of power in January. It's hard to imagine that Gates came prepared to listen to Mr. Obama more than he came to sell his own ambitiously promoted defense of Bush's transparently political policy in Iraq and everywhere else in the Bush Pentagon's decidedly ideological eye.
If Pres. Obama is going to bring change to the direction and scope of our military engagements and aggression abroad and keep Bush's defense secretary in place, Gates will need to stand down or signal some capitulation right now to the intention and will of the new commander-in-chief of our military forces.
I won't hold my breath for that.