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Client-partners
Certainly Gates' business activities might make it difficult for him to push back against the formidable Cheney.
Gates has been on the board of directors for Parker Drilling Company since 2001. A major client-partner of Parker is Halliburton. In 2004, for example, Halliburton landed the Iride-Samaria Project in Mexico for $175 million, and Parker was brought into the project to provide the rigs and crews.
Serving on the Parker board with Gates is John W. Gibson, who until 2004 served as chief executive officer of Halliburton Energy Services and who acknowledges having gone hunting with Vice President Cheney.
Another member of the Parker board is Robert E. McKee III, who is currently the chairman of Eventure, a Shell-Halliburton joint project, as well as being the senior adviser to the Iraqi Oil Ministry
In addition to this, Gates serves with Donald Rumsfeld on the steering committee of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). CSIS is described in general as a neoconservative think tank, and in particular as a largely far-right funded institution, founded with Richard Scaife funds. During the 1970's, when George H.W. Bush was CIA director, the group was involved in an intelligence experiment called Team B, which manufactured or misrepresented intelligence to magnify the Cold War Soviet threat.
But some of Gates' former CIA colleagues make the argument that neither Gates nor Cheney is really an ideologue or a neoconservative. Nor, they insist, are they pragmatists or realists, as some have taken to describing the Bush 41 administration, in comparison to the current Bush administration. Essentially, as one former high ranking CIA official tells it, the idealogues have been booted, and those remaining are all corporatists.
This official cautioned that major changes in Iraq should not be expected from Gates. Mel Goodman concurs, adding that he believes that Gates will add troops, not reduce the number.
Retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who most recently served as Secretary of State Powell's chief of staff and who has been a harsh critique of the Bush administration, believes that Gates will do well.
"[Gates is] a solid guy who has made his way through the bureaucracy largely by doing what he was asked to do -- and in present circumstances, I believe that will be a positive," said Wilkerson.
"...Gates will follow the rules and the direction. And one hopes the President will listen to Baker-Hamilton and make their recommendations the "rules and the direction."
One former senior aide to the National Security Council, who wished to remain anonymous, offered a different perspective, saying "They are doing cartwheels in the E ring and could not care who was nominated so long as Rumsfeld resigned. They would not care if Satan replaced him."
The "E Ring" is Defense Department lingo for the outermost offices of the Pentagon.
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