Monday, October 24, 2022
Pillaging by Proxy
In his 2011 farewell address to graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates raised eyebrows when he said that any future Pentagon chief “who advises the President to again send a big American land army into Asia or the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” He made the statement just months before NATO began its aerial assault on the Libyan state, and it would prove to be one of his last major speeches as Secretary of Defense. That fall, having lost the argument over whether to deepen U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war, Gates was replaced at the Pentagon by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta. Panetta was in turn replaced at Langley by unconventional warfare guru David Petraeus, who would run the covert regime-change war as Director of Central Intelligence.
