Gates is not like Rumsfeld. We don’t have to worry that he’s an erratic bully.. Gates doesn’t have the Rumsfeld signature: Sun (ego) conjunct Pluto (bully) square Uranus (erratic). But he has something almost as bad. Neptune rules him. With his Sun conjunct Neptune he swims in illusion. He’s as fantasy driven as Bush is with his Sun Square Neptune. In Gates, this delusional aspect is also conjoined with Mercury (thinking) and square Saturn (defensiveness and rigidity).
Isabelle Hickey in her book, Astrology, A Cosmic Science says this about Sun conjunct Neptune: “Apt to deceive oneself unknowingly. What is undercover is far more important than what is on the surface and if the person isn’t evolved there can be something undercover that is detrimental and disintegrative in effect. Watch the tendency to color and shade the truth.”
The Neptune makes Gates deceptive while his Sun in Libra makes him sycophantic. A low level Libra can be unable to make decisions or is self-effacing with those in authority, not wanting to endanger the relationships he must cultivate in order to not feel inferior (Sun square Saturn). He’s a suck-up; he tells his superiors what they want to hear, in order to curry favor. Robert Perry in his recent article, The Secret World of Robert Gates writes, “Beyond the secret schemes to aid Iran and Iraq in the 1980’s, Gates also stands accused of playing a central role in politicizing the CIA intelligence product, tailoring it to fit the interests of his political superiors, a legacy that some Gates critics say contributed to the botched CIA’s analysis of Iraqi WMD in 2002."
Former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, also calls Gates an intelligence fixer. He cooked the books on the Soviet Union while the CIA employed him. He believed like his mentor, William Casey, that the Soviet government was much stronger than it was, that Gorbachev was “simply cleverer than his predecessors” and nothing would ever change. With his defective analysis, he and the CIA missed the break-up of the Soviet Union. “Watch the tendency to color and shade the truth,” Hickey said of this Neptune Sun aspect. “Apt to deceive oneself unknowingly.”
More from McGovern: According to Iran Contra investigation independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, Gates “denied recollection of facts thirty three times”, despite the fact that senior CIA officials claimed they had informed Gates that North had diverted funds from the Iranian arms deal to the Contras.
Regarding the issue of the Iraq War, the last thing we need is another suck-up like ex-CIA head George Tenet, refusing to speak truth to power. The only thing that will get us out of this mess is blunt honesty. Unless Gates has changed his tune, he is a poor choice for Secretary of Defense. How about Howard Dean, instead? Ha. Ha. As if.
