The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward wrote a front-page story that includes excerpts from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s new book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War.

According to Woodward, Gates “unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war… It is rare for a former Cabinet member, let alone a defense secretary occupying a central position in the chain of command, to publish such an antagonistic portrait of a sitting president.”

But one begins to understand what underlies Secretary Gates’s judgment after learning about his thoughts during a meeting he attended. “As I sat there,” Gates writes, “I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Bear in mind that Mr. Obama was interested in getting out even as he gave the order to deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. It was evident to some people at the time, and evident to everyone now, that President Obama had little interest in winning the war in Afghanistan. His aim was to check the box on the way to ending our involvement there.

Secretary Gates also writes about an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.

These are an extraordinary series of revelations. The commander in chief (a) sent troops to fight and die in a war (Afghanistan) he wasn’t committed to and in whose strategy he had no confidence in; and (b) as a senator opposed for partisan reasons a counterinsurgency strategy that turned a war we were losing (Iraq) into one we were winning.

Losing a war is among the worst things that can happen to a nation. Yet we have as president a man who was willing to have America lose in Iraq in order to advance his own political ambitions. And a man, by the way, who constantly chastises Republicans for putting politics above country while portraying himself as the one true patriot.

Having served in the White House for seven years and spanning two wars, I had first-hand exposure to the devotion Mr. Obama’s predecessor had for our troops and how fiercely dedicated he was to having America prevail in these conflicts. Partisan politics not only didn’t drive President Bush’s decisions; they didn’t even enter into them. That is as it should be. For Mr. Obama, on the other hand–at least based on the account by the widely respected Bob Gates–partisan politics was an overwhelming factor in guiding Obama’s major war decisions.

Barack Obama acted in a way that was selfish, cynical, and contemptible. He sent young men and women to die for a war he was utterly ambivalent about and which he had no interest in winning. (Recall that Mr. Obama decided to withdraw the surge troops in Afghanistan in the middle of the fighting season rather than what the military recommended. That decision made no sense from a military standpoint, but it did happen to occur shortly before the 2012 presidential election.) As a senator he did everything he could to ensure that we would lose the Iraq war.

What Secretary Gates has revealed is a moral stain on the president that will never be removed.