You’ve heard the line that some public figures are loved for the enemies they’ve made. If this is true, then the news that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is under attack in the pages of the New York Post may only increase his popularity, rather than decrease it.
It seems some anonymous Post editorial writer has taken exception to Gates’ recent warnings about Washington getting too deeply involved in Libya, and about the US making the mistake of “again send[ing] a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa.”
Gates can take comfort from the following fact: a public stance on an issue that makes a nameless, faceless laptop bombardier sputter with rage is probably the correct one to take.
More importantly, what stirs up anger among certain editorial writers will play well on Main Street, especially with the segments of the broader public tired of the mounting costs of the numerous ongoing US interventions overseas.
Like Gates, the public knows that, even for a powerful country like United States, there is “no such thing as a little war,” as a 19th century statesman once put it.
The Post editorial does not accuse Gates of “treason” or “disloyalty,” but it does imply that the Secretary is not enough of a team player to continue in his current job.
What critics may want to call disloyalty on Gates’ part is, in fact, loyalty of the highest kind – a patriotic loyalty to the US armed forces, and to the families of those men and women who, after hearing the call to duty, must risk their lives and take up positions far from home.
It’s the same sort of loyalty that moved US General Fred C. Weyand, in 1976, to issue the following warning to those who might involve the US in a second Vietnam-style intervention:
Gates is admittedly an intelligence professional, not a military professional, but he feels the same need to speak up that Weyand described, to help Americans think more carefully in future about “the probable costs of involvement against the dangers of noninvolvement,” when it comes to military intervention.
The US doesn’t need Secretary Gates to shut up – rather, it needs him to keep talking and to keep raising questions.
(And it wouldn’t hurt for Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Richard Lugar and others to join him in doing so.)
