A lengthy profile of Secretary of Defense Bob Gates in Foreign Policy magazine says he plans to leave the administration next year.

The anti-war loons are in a fit over president-elect Obama’s likely decision to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Instead, they’re pushing for him to name a more anti-war voice.

Arms control advocates and anti-war activists are ratcheting up pressure on President-elect Barack ObamaDefense Secretary Robert Gates and replace him with a more strident anti-war voice. to dump

Nominating Gates to stay, “would be a violation of the mandate for change that Obama says he represents,” said Medea Benjamin, cofounder of the anti-war group CodePink.

How can you have a Secretary of Defense that’s anti-war? Isn’t that kind of an oxymoron? Secondly, the idea that anyone would take national security advice from the code pinkos is laughable at best. Bob Gates is about as moderate as they come. He’s not anti-war, but he’s certainly not pro-war either.

The least Obama can do to assure the country that he’s not a total peacenik pushover is to keep someone competent like Gates in the Sec Def spot. All Americans with the exception of the pinkos will sleep much better at night.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates held talks here Sunday with his Turkish counterpart as tension mounted between the two nations over Ankara’s plans for possible attacks on Kurdish rebels in Iraq. Gates urged Turkey to obtain precise information on the location of the separatist rebels before launching any military incursion into northern Iraq.

“The key is to develop intelligence to enable us to find these people… that has to precede any action by anybody,” he told reporters after meeting here with Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul.

“Lacking specific targets is likely to lead to a lot of collateral damage… restraint should not be confused with weakness,” he said, adding that military action “would be contrary to Turkey’s interests but also to US interests and Iraq.”

For his part, Gonul said that Turkey has plans to make a cross-border incursion to attack Kurdish rebel bases in northern Iraq but “not urgently.”