Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Iraq - Obama's Vietnam?
The Pentagon has long denied the US is moving troops into combat roles in Iraq. The entire Obama team said Sergeant Joshua Wheeler was in Iraq under Operation Inherent Resolve, the name for President Obama's "non-combat" strategy to "degrade and defeat" ISIS that includes airstrikes. At a press briefing last Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook rebuffed questions about US "boots on the ground." He said only that US troops supporting Iraqi forces "are allowed to defend themselves, and also defend partner forces, and to protect against the loss of innocent life. And that's what played out in this particular operation," Cook said, referring to the joint Delta Force-Iraqi raid in which Sergeant Wheeler was killed. ~~~~~ Four years after Obama withdew US troops from Iraq in 2011, to make good on candidate Obama's promise to end the Iraq war, there are 3,550 US military personnel in Iraq under President Obama's orders. How did it happen? In June 2014, Obama deployed 300 Special Forces troops to Iraq to train Iraqis fighting ISIS, saying : “American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq, but we will help Iraqis as they take the fight to terrorists who threaten the Iraqi people, the region and American interests as well.” Two months later, Obama approved 130 more US troops for northern Iraq to rescue thousands of Yazidis trapped by an ISIS advance on Mount Sinjar. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said : “Very specifically, this is not a combat, boots-on-the-ground operation.” In September 2014, Obama began airstrikes against ISIS and sent another 475 troops to Iraq, taking the total to 1,518 : “As I have said before, these American forces will not have a combat mission. We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq.” In November 2014, the White House announced another 1,500 troops for Iraq “in a non-combat role to train, advise, and assist Iraqi security forces, including Kurdish forces.” And last June, Obama sent another 450 troops to “train, advise and assist” Iraqi forces in Anbar province, saying : “These additional US troops will not serve in a combat role and will augment the 3,100 U.S. troops who have already deployed to Iraq.” ~~~~~ As with most Obama statements about Iraq, his "no combat" troop fantasy has hit the wall of reality. Just days after White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the raid authorized by Carter “is consistent with our mission to train, advise and assist Iraqi forces," we learned today what Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine General Joseph Dunford told the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday. Carter told the Committee the US will begin "direct action on the ground" against ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria, to intensify pressure on the terrorists. Carter told the Committee : "We won't hold back from supporting capable partners in opportunistic attacks against ISIL, or conducting such missions directly whether by strikes from the air or direct action on the ground." ~~~~~ Dear readers, finally, after months of denying that US troops would have any combat role in Iraq, Carter late last week acknowledged that the rescue raid was combat : "This is combat and things are complicated." Then, Carter told the Committee that Wheeler "was killed in combat." White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz predictably insisted the Obama administration has "no intention of long term ground combat." He added that US forces will continue to robustly train, advise and assist. Senator Lindsey Graham said the US Syria effort is a "half-assed strategy at best," and said the US is not doing a "damn thing" to bring down Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime. Carter pushed back but General Dunford acknowledged that the "balance of forces" has tilted in al-Assad's favor. So, Obama has capitulated to reality - he does have combat boots on the ground in Iraq - and Syria. But, Obama still has no strategy. He has simply put more US soldiers in greater danger with no sense of their real mission. Legacy? Russia? Iran? Or Obama's Vietnam?
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Advocating the defeat of ISIL over the short-term without acknowledging what will be necessary to achieve that end is a recipe for mission creep. Mission creep is a recipe for ANY policy failure or failure for NO policy. Because if we learned politically nothing from Vietnam we should have learned that the American people will not allow sustained investment in a policy they did not commit to originally.
ReplyDeleteThis is the most important strategic lesson from Iraq: Don’t BS the American people into a war with shifting objectives (even if those goals are important) because they will not put up with that commitment long enough for those goals to be achieved.
This is not a call for passivity; it is a call for fighting to win, which requires sustained commitment, which requires frankness in our discourse about whether to choose war. We should only fight if we are fighting to win, and we will only win when we commit as a country—not 51%, or the viewers of one cable news station or another, or because one party or faction has managed to back a president into a political corner. The country must be ready to accept the sacrifices necessary to achieve grand political ends. Until then, any call to “defeat ISIL” that is not forthright about what that will require is actually an argument for expensive failure.
The Middle east via the Obama administration is already a bigger shambles that Viet Nam was under Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Nixon. If we continue on the policy path that Obama has vacillated with we are headed for more Body Bags and increased activity at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
It cannot be credibly argued that the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2010 contributed to the rise of ISIL without also acknowledging that the U.S. invasion in 2003 did the same. The former without the latter is a political argument, not a policy position. The same goes for airstrikes in Syria and arming the Syrian rebels. It’s a reasonable hypothesis that supporting the Free Syrian Army earlier might have blunted ISIL, but that’s a pretty hollow position if one also gives Syrian rebel factions a pass for tolerating and even embracing ISIL and Jabhat al-Nusrah through late 2012.
ReplyDeleteIt was clear to me in the summer of 2011 that the Islamic State of Iraq was well-positioned to capitalize on what was then a largely peaceful Syrian protest movement. And it was just as obvious that the group—whose brutality, extremism, and grandiose political aspirations were well-documented long before the Syrian uprising—would later turn on the Syrian rebels whose cause they claimed to champion. The same should have been obvious to the Syrian rebels, their external supporters, and pretty much anyone interested in the Syrian uprising and the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.
During the earliest stages of the Vietnam War in the late parts of the 1950’s during the Eisenhower administration there was what was called the “Domino Effect” theory. Briefly stated it was that if Vietnam fell into the control of North Vietnam (and the Chinese Communists) ALL of Southeast Asia would quickly follow. This was an assumption that Eisenhower and the 3 following United States president’s allowed the media to.
ReplyDeleteFact is Vietnam was under taken to protect the Philippine Islands from becoming a communist’s strong hold, thereby taking away the deep sea ports and Air bases that we had in Subic Bay via agreements with President Marcos. The United States at that point had ZERO interest in the welfare of the Philippines. Just as we have today with Syria except for public relations and stopping Russia from further getting a strong grip in the Middle East and their widely distributed oil fields across many nations.
So the common thread of the Vietnam War and the Syrian butchery is the defeat of what appears to be the rebirth of an aggressive Russian nation building crusade. First the Ukraine, now Syria, soon the rest of rebellious countries in the Middle east that are in upheaval with the jihad fundamentalists.
The real difference is that we have Obama and they have Putin, a vastly different person than Obama and his lack of commitment to anything but his legacy. Russia is again is the free world nemesis.