Robert Gates does his Jon Lovitz impression

Here's Robert Gates answering a question about why the U.S. is staging a massive naval exercise near Iran:

Q:  Mr. Secretary, yesterday nine U.S. war ships entered the Arabian Gulf. Could you explain for us what the main reason behind this? And is it a show of force or?

SEC. GATES: It's an exercise pure and simple. The two aircraft carriers were going to be in the Gulf together in any event to do exercises. The Marine Expeditionary Force and the third large ship is on its way to Kuwait to deliver those Marines who will go into Iraq, and so the commander saw an opportunity to have an exercise where the naval commander gets some experience in commanding or organizing and coordinating operations from three large entities. It's not intended as a show of force. It patently is a show of force just because that's a lot of ships and clearly a lot of military power.

But the intent is pure and simple -- an exercise where we saw the opportunity to take advantage of a confluence of schedules for these three ships to -- three -- the two carriers and the MEF -- to have the opportunity to exercise together.

Yeah...yeah, they just happened to be in the same place together at the same time.  Their, uh, their schedules were in sync that day.  Yeah, that's it.  So they decided to have a get-together. Like a little lunch date, right?  It had nothing to do with Iran.  Yeah--that's the ticket!

Comments

[rd]

wasn't the fall of Rome party attributed to their over extension of the military?