America’s Lost Ally
18th August 2011
George Will turns over a rock.
We are in the fifth month of the Libyan intervention that Barack Obama’s administration said would involve “days, not weeks,” an undertaking about which Prime Minister David Cameron was much more enthusiastic than Obama, who rarely mentions it. The intervention resulted from Cameron’s and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s sudden zest for waging humanitarian war.
In 2002, during preparations for the invasion of Iraq, the then head of the British army, returning from a Washington visit, told Hastings, “Mass matters — and we don’t have it.” Hastings notes that the U.S. Marine Corps’ air wing is larger than the Royal Air Force. Americans know that “if the British army shrinks as scheduled after withdrawal from Afghanistan, we shall thereafter be able to deploy only a single brigade group of 7,000 to 8,000 men for sustained operations overseas.”