Gates promised that America would not leave until the Afghan and Iraqi forces stand up  even when he gets stood up, as he did by Nuri Kamal al-Maliki Thursday night.

Image Maureen Dowd Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The Iraqi prime minister blew off a planned meeting with Gates because he was in a scorching closed-door six-hour meeting with Iraqi lawmakers, being taken to task for his failure to stop five bombings that ripped into government buildings Tuesday, killing 127 people and wounding hundreds more.

The defense secretary’s aides tried to spin the snub, noting that their guy was merely an appointed official while Maliki was an elected leader. When the prime minister finally agreed to reschedule the meeting for 7:50 a.m. Friday, Gates’s aides gleefully noted that, given Maliki’s preference for sleeping late, it was a diplomatic triumph, even if the Iraqi had on pajamas under his suit.

After four days of preaching a message of love  Gates said it was “a myth” that America likes war and called it the first time in military history that an occupying force was in Afghanistan “on behalf of the Afghans rather than to conquer”  he finally got some back.

“You look very young  you look much older on TV,” Maj. Gen. Turhan Abdul Rahman, the leather-clad Kirkuk provincial director of police, told the manicured Gates.

If Rummy had been dissed by our inglorious glove puppets, he would have blown his top. But the disciplined, analytical, pragmatic, introverted Gates is no Rummy (nor does he call his predecessor). His form of ego is not to show ego. When a much-anticipated trip to see an Army Stryker brigade in Kandahar was canceled because of fog, he dryly told us: “As Clint Eastwood said, ‘A man’s got to know his limitations.’ ”

The Cold Warrior who helped persuade the Reluctant Warrior to do the Afghan surge has sometimes been on the wrong side of history  with the Soviet Union, the Iran-contra scandal and the 1989 desertion of Afghanistan.