Gates Warns Against Future Invasions
PressTV.ir reports:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of regime in that fashion again are slim.
"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," Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets.
"The odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq -- invading, pacifying and administering a large third-world country -- may be low," Gates said.
He did not directly criticize the Bush administration's decisions to go to war. Even so, his never-again formulation was unusually pointed, especially at a time of upheaval across the Arab world and beyond.
He said Iraq and Afghanistan had become known as “the captains' wars” because “officers of lower and lower rank were put in the position of making decisions of higher and higher degrees of consequence and complexity.”
Gates has said that he would leave office this year, and the speech at West Point could be heard as his farewell to the Army.
