In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should "have his head examined," as General MacArthur so delicately put it. — Robert Gates, February 25
Before and after President Obama decided to be "very unambiguous" about why Muammar Qaddafi should step down, a lot of people were reading way too much into his defense secretary's comments above, made at West Point as part of a legacy tour that just happened to fall in the middle of a civil war. Was this some preemptive kind of door-slamming on the prospect of U.S. military intervention in Libya and whatever follow-on "Facebook revolutions" are to come? Not really. As MacArthur himself — a serious headcase if there ever was one — discovered with Truman, only the commander in chief makes those calls. The rest of us are just advisors, onlookers, and ne'er-do-wells.
And don't read too much into Hillary Clinton's own Libya whopper on Tuesday — "This doesn't come from some Western power or some Gulf country saying this is what you should do, this is how you should live" — because there's a lot more going on here than no-fly zones. As the world awaits our next move in the Middle East's power struggle, an intense battle is unfolding within the national-security establishment back home: The "future of the force," as insiders here in Washington and around the Pentagon like to call it, hangs in the balance. And Robert Gates, having already advertised that the United States of America had reached its limits, and now poised for his final power play, knows how to counter better than anyone in the president's ear....
Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/robert-gates-libya-5372252?src=rss
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