Thursday, June 11, 2015

A Look At Why U.S. Military Leaders Believe Military Escalation In Iraq Is Inevitable



Mark Perry, Al Jazeera: Why military leaders believe US escalation in Iraq is inevitable

Analysis: Serving, retired U.S. commanders believe deploying trainers to Iraq won’t be enough to stop ISIL

President Barack Obama’s plan to send an additional 450 to 500 soldiers to Iraq’s Anbar province won’t be his last word on the crisis posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), several senior serving and retired U.S. military officers believe. Turning the tide against ISIL in Iraq will require a more robust U.S. military commitment, with options for escalation a matter of lively debate.

Obama on Tuesday announced that the additional troops would be deployed to train units of the Iraq Security Force (ISF), which Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said “showed no will to fight” to prevent the city of Ramadi from falling to ISIL. The administration also hoped those troops could provide a bridge to Anbar’s Sunni militias, which had initially fought the U.S. occupation, then after 2006 sided with the U.S. against Al-Qaeda, but had been alienated by the Shia-led government in Baghdad. The new training commitment would bring the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq to just over 3,500.

WNU Editor: A sobering assessment on U.S. options in the war against the Islamic State. Read it all.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Some wags were dissing the U.S. about a lack of reconstruction. there was reconstruction.There would have been more, but the US was at war with AL Qaeda and Iran among others.

He is an example of that reconstruction and war.

"On September 30, 2004, almost three dozen children died when a bomb went off at a street festival celebrating the opening of a water-treatment plant in a poor section of Baghdad. The bombing was roundly condemned as a particularly brutal act, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda group quickly took credit for it."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/214961/massacre-innocents-james-s-robbins