Le secrétaire à la défense Robert Gates: “I feel personally responsible for each and every one of you,’’

Le Boston Globe revient sur un discours de Gates à West Point le mois dernier...


One pictures the dressed lines of gray tunics, bright young faces lifted to the white-haired Gates with utter trust. The secretary did not invoke the story of the nearly slain son, of course, but neither did he flinch from the gravity of his role. “I feel personally responsible for each and every one of you,’’ he solemnly told the cadets, “as if you were my own sons and daughters.’’

The speech was extraordinary, also, for its frank acknowledgment that America’s elders have consistently failed the nation’s sons and daughters in sending them off to war. “Since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right — from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more.’’ Gates was faulting failures to anticipate the true nature of those engagements, but their outcomes arguably establish that all of them were unjustified. Young lives wasted.

More pointedly, Gates all but explicitly condemned the wars over which he himself presides today: “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.’’ But that reference makes the point. Since Korea, the national security establishment has consistently gotten it wrong. Why should elders be trusted now?

Le lien pour l'article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/03/07/saving_our_young_from_ourselves/