In a much discussed speech at West Point two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that the U.S. should get out of the business of fighting the kinds of open-ended ground wars that it has waged for the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Any future Defense Secretary who advocated sending “a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,'” Gates said, quoting Douglas MacArthur. That line was celebrated by antiwar doves, who instantly claimed Gates as one of their own, and condemned by conservative hawks, who called him a defeatist. But both sides managed to miss Gates’ real point: even as America’s appetite for fighting conventional wars shrinks, the range of threats — such as “terrorists, insurgents, militia groups, rogue states or emerging powers” — continues to grow. American military power thus will still be needed “at various levels in various locations” around the world to “prevent festering problems from growing into full-blown crises.”
Sooner than Gates may have expected, that doctrine is being put to the test in Libya. Hopes that the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi would quickly topple him have proven illusory. Gaddafi’s bands of militias and foreign mercenaries have employed ruthless force against the rebels and indiscriminately opened fire on civilians, in full view of international journalists. The country is on the verge of a horrific civil war, if it hasn’t started already. Libya’s conflict could soon become exactly the kind of full-blown crisis Gates predicted — one that claims thousands of lives, drives up oil prices, deluges Europe with refugees and creates anarchy that groups like al-Qaeda will seek to exploit.
