Secretary Gates made me nervous when he first entered office since I worried he was brought on to oversee the premature withdrawal from Iraq. Gates has been far better than I feared, and he clearly cares for the troops he supervises and wants to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have other problems with him, mostly his cover for Obama administration cuts to defense spending, but overall I like him. He's certainly better than I could have hoped under a very liberal Democratic administration.
But this is out of line:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned Friday that the U.S. should avoid future land wars like those it has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not to forget the difficult lessons it has learned from those conflicts.
"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 Gen. (Douglas) MacArthur so delicately put it," Gates said in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
How could Gates say that? Sure, the practical effect of two land wars in the greater Middle East region will be to lessen our willingness to fight a land war there. But why say it and possibly encourage enemies?
Didn't Gates just effectively say that South Korea and Iraq are outside our defense perimeter when it comes to where we will send our ground forces to help an ally? Didn't we experience the consequences of declaring an intervention on behalf of an ally is ill advised before?
I'm not prepared to predict where we might need to commit our land forces. I'm not eager to do it, but if our allies or vital interests are threatened, why make it more likely that a potential enemy will assume we won't commit land forces to defend an ally or vital interest?
Somebody needs to have their head examined, alright--or at least have another level of review for their speeches added.
