Gates rips Europe's pacifist mood
In a speech to NATO officers at the National Defense University on Tuesday, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates ripped Europe for its mood of opposition to the military, which he called a danger to peace. “The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st,” he told NATO officers and officials in a speech at the National Defense University, the Defense Department-financed graduate school for military officers and diplomats.Unfortunately, Gates has two elephants in the room with him. One is a potential conflict in Iran, which was not even mentioned in the New York Times' coverage.
A perception of European weakness, he warned, could provide a “temptation to miscalculation and aggression” by hostile powers.
The meeting was a prelude to the alliance’s review this year of its basic mission plan for the first time since 1999. “Right now,” Mr. Gates said, “the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems.”
Mr. Gates’s blunt comments came just three days after the coalition government of the Netherlands collapsed in a dispute over keeping Dutch troops in Afghanistan. It now appears almost certain that most of the 2,000 Dutch troops there will be withdrawn this year. And polls show that the Afghanistan war has grown increasingly unpopular in nearly every European country.
The other is that the President of the United States is even more opposed to military conflict than the Europeans are.
What could go wrong?
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:53 PM
4 Comments:
America and Europe are both impotent where it matters.
The Far Left wing of the Democratic Party is opposed to the US defending itself in a dangerous world and is against all wars.
What could go wrong indeed
I think that Gates simply does not understand either the European "sophistication" or the "progressive" agenda of Obama. How could he...he was nominated by the evil "BBBBBUSH".
He really is a token guy trying to find some path, any path, between the realism of the Bush administration and the appeasement and suicidal tendencies of the BHO administration. Poor man. That would not be an easy place to be. As O'Reilly would say, he is "caught between Barack and a hard place!"
Europe was once a young man, strapping and with the swagger of a thug. Since the war, its become a little girl in sex-change gone horribly wrong. It now finds itself disfigured, wheelchair-bound and incontinent. Hashem is indeed mighty.
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