Robert Gates: America Needs Cold War-Style Containment Strategy To Deal With Islamic Extremism [VIDEO]

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says that America needs a “long-range game plan” similar to the containment strategy practiced during the Cold War.

Gates, in testimony in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday, was questioned by Republican Alabama Sen. [crscore]Jeff Sessions[/crscore] regarding what strategy would work against “extremism in the Middle East.”

“We face a generation of conflict in the Middle East,” said Gates. “I think we have four, at least four conflicts going on simultaneously. Shia Islam led by Iran versus Sunni Islam led by Saudi Arabia. Reformers versus authoritarians, Islamists versus secularists.”

“And then the question of whether these artificially created countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, comprised by historically adversarial ethnic and religious groups can hold together at all,” explained Gates with Syria being the epicenter of it all.

“My concern is I don’t see an overreaching or overriding strategy on the part of the United States to how we intend to deal with this complex challenge for the next 20 or 30 years,” lamented Gates. However, “I will always believe that critical to our success in the Cold War was that we had a broad strategy called ‘containment’ that was practiced by nine successive administrations of both political parties. It had bipartisan support… We don’t have anything like it with respect to the Middle East.”

Gates concluded, “We are kind of dealing with each of these crises individually. Rather than backing up and saying, ‘What’s our ling range game plan here and who are going to be our allies? Who are going to be our friends? Where do we contain? Where do we let it burn itself out?’ We just really haven’t addressed those long term questions it seems to me. We are thinking strictly in month-to-month terms.”

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