House Panel Presses Gates on Libya Campaign

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and THOM SHANKER

Published: March 31, 2011

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, faced tough questions on Thursday from members of Congress who are angry about the administration’s push into Libya and deeply skeptical about President Obama’s plans to end the conflict.
“History has demonstrated that an entrenched enemy like the Libyan regime can be resilient to airpower,” Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at the start of daylong hearings in both houses of Congress on the allied assault on forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. “If Qaddafi does not face an imminent military defeat or refuses to abdicate, it seems that NATO could be expected to support decade-long no-fly zone enforcement like the one over Iraq in the 1990s,” Mr. McKeon said as he opened a hearing of his committee.
Democrats, too, were circumspect. “Many have asked, ‘Why Libya?’ ” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House panel.
In response, Mr. Gates said in his opening statement to the House committee that American involvement would be limited. He said that in his view, the conflict would probably end with Colonel Qaddafi’s removal from power, either by economic and political pressures or by his own people.
But under questioning from Mr. McKeon, Mr. Gates said he did not have a time frame for Colonel Qaddafi’s ouster. “The bottom line is, no one can predict for you how long it will take for that to happen,” he said.
Mr. McKeon told the defense secretary that he was concerned about what he described as a disconnect between the American military’s stated mission of protecting Libyan civilians and Mr. Obama’s political mission of removing Colonel Qaddafi from power. “I’m concerned that such a mismatch is a strategy for stalemate,” Mr. McKeon said.
Mr. Gates replied that he felt strongly that the military mission must be a limited one, and then obliquely referred to the war in Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein. “We tried regime change before, and sometimes it’s worked and sometimes it’s taken ten years,” he said.
Mr. Smith asked why the administration did not notify Congress before launching some 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Libya and striking at Colonel Qaddafi’s ground forces. Mr. Gates replied that the president did not decide to take action against Libya until a Thursday night, less than 48 hours before the first Tomahawks were fired.
To that, Mr. Smith said that “before the White House knows exactly what it is going to do, there is some benefit to bringing leadership in the Congress into the discussion, in terms of building support here.”
Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen were summoned before Congress as Colonel Qaddafi’s forces pushed the rebels into a panicked retreat, and recaptured towns they had lost just days ago because of allied airstrikes.
Mr. Gates, for one, made clear where he stood in the administration’s debate on whether the United States should arm the rebels to help them again Colonel Qaddafi.
“What the opposition needs as much as anything right now is some training, some command and control and some organization,” Mr. Gates said. “It’s pretty much a pick-up ballgame at this point.” Yet he said, “that’s not a unique capability for the United States, and as far as I’m concerned, somebody else can do that.”
A short time later Representative Jeff Miller, Republican of Florida, asked whether the administration had plans to arm the rebels, and observed, “They seem to be getting their butts whipped.”
Admiral Mullen replied, in an echo of Mr. Obama, that “we certainly are looking at options from not doing it to doing it,” and then added, “there are plenty of countries that have the abilities, the arms, the skill set, to be able to do this.”

Connect with The New York Times on Facebook.