Doesn't this guy know how things work in the Obama Administration? When the president makes a public pronouncement, however absurd, you fall in line and parrot the pronouncement.
No U.S. boots on the ground! Air power only! Other countries will handle the combat duties against ISIS! That's what the voters want to hear so that's what we're going to do!
I guess no one told General Martin Dempsey when he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because the guy's been giving Congress a feast of truth-telling the last couple days. First he let on that he would indeed recommend to Obama that U.S. "advisers" join our allies on the ground in fighting. And now he has spilled the beans about the true nature of the most pivotal ally in this whole gambit. They're not exactly up to the task:
The U.S. military's top officer said Wednesday that almost half of Iraq's army is incapable of working against the Islamic State militant group, while the other half needs to be rebuilt with the help of U.S. advisers and military equipment.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey made the remarks to reporters while traveling to Paris to meet with his French counterpart to discuss the situation in Iraq and Syria. The general said that U.S. assessors who had spent the summer observing Iraq's security forces concluded that 26 of the army's 50 brigades would be capable of confronting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Dempsey described those brigades as well-led, capable, and endowed with a nationalist instinct, as opposed to a sectarian instinct.
However, Dempsey said that the other 24 brigades were too heavily populated with Shiites to be part of a credible force against the Sunni ISIS.
Sectarianism has been a major problem for the Iraqi security forces for years and is in part a reflection of resentments that built up during the decades of rule under Saddam Hussein, who repressed the majority Shiite population, and the unleashing of reprisals against Sunnis after U.S. forces toppled him in April 2003. Sunni resistance led to the relatively brief rise of an extremist group called Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That group withered but re-emerged as the Islamic State organization, which capitalized on Sunni disenchantment with the Shiite government in Baghdad.
On Tuesday, Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he would consider recommending the return of ground forces to Iraq if an international coalition sought by the Obama administration proves ineffective.
This raises an interesting question. Where do you suppose Obama came up with the notion that we could limit our role to air power and count on other countries to do the fighting on the ground? The guess here is that he simply pulled it out of his #, without even considering the question of whether the parties he had in mind were capable of doing the fighting.
That would be pretty consistent with the way Obama has typically thought on foreign policy questions. He knows how he wants things to work, and he simply declares that this is how they will be. If it doesn't work out that way, it's not his fault. He had the right idea! Someone else just didn't do what he knew they should and if only everyone would conform to Obama's ideals about the world, we would all be much better off.
I'd be surprised if Obama consulted his generals at all before he announced in an address to the nation that the fight against ISIS would rely on other countries' boots on the ground. And if he did, Dempsey surely told him exactly what he told Congress yesterday - and yet Obama went ahead and said it anyway. Why? Because in his view, domestic politics demanded it, and no strategic reality is going to trump domestic politics in Obama's mind.
And let's not forget once again how the domestic politics came to be what they are. It was Democrats who gleefully led the charge in turning the nation against all U.S. involvement in ground combat, using it as the opportunity to wound George W. Bush politically and return themselves to power. And that they did, only to find that once in power, the option of using U.S. military power where needed was unavailable to them because they made it so: U.S. involvement in overseas combat is dumb. Only Democrats will refuse to engage in it. Therefore, elect Democrats.
Yep. ISIS was paying attention to that as well. So now Obama is left to promise that other nations will do the fighting, even though his own top general knows full well - and says so publicly - that they are not up to the task.
Can this presidency please be over? I know how much longer we still have to wait, but I'm asking anyway.
