Category: Terror War

AFP reports that 5 UN Chadian Peacekeepers were killed in Mali Thursday by a roadside bomb;

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Friday he was “outraged” by an attack that killed five Chadian peacekeepers in Mali and called for an immediate halt to such incidents.

The five soldiers died and three others were injured Thursday when their truck was hit by an explosive device, Ban’s spokesman said in a statement.

“The Secretary General is outraged by the attack,” the spokesman said.

“These continued assaults against the United Nations must cease immediately.”

Yeah, so I’m sure they’ll stop now. This comes just a week after Fijian peacekeepers were released by al Qaeda jihadists in Syria. I guess it’s getting pretty hazardous to be a peacekeeper.

In the Washington Post, by way of the Stars & Stripes, they describe the tug-of-war between the White House and the Pentagon over the use of troops in Iraq;

[A] series of military leaders have criticized the president’s approach against the Islamic State militant group.

Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, who served under Obama until last year, became the latest high-profile skeptic on Thursday, telling the House Intelligence Committee that a blanket prohibition on ground combat was tying the military’s hands. “Half-hearted or tentative efforts, or airstrikes alone, can backfire on us and actually strengthen our foes’ credibility,” he said. “We may not wish to reassure our enemies in advance that they will not see American boots on the ground.”

We’ve all been there before – a White House that doesn’t want to call their employment of troops a path to success, that can’t form the word “Victory” with their crooked mouths. Meanwhile, The Post‘s David Ignatius reports that James Clapper is making excuses that they had underestimated the Islamic State;

“What we didn’t do was predict the will to fight. That’s always a problem. We didn’t do it in Vietnam. We underestimated the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese and overestimated the will of the South Vietnamese. In this case, we underestimated ISIL [the Islamic State] and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army. .?.?. I didn’t see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming. I didn’t see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.”

Well, that’s disingenuous, they saw the Iraqi Army collapse in the battle against ISIS for Fallujah in February and they made empty promises of support for the Iraqi government that were still unfulfilled six months later as the Islamic State lined up at the gates of Baghdad. There were plenty of indications, most of the people who read these pages saw it coming – do you actually mean that no one in the Pentagon, no one at the State Department, no one in the White House saw it when was obvious to the whole rest of the country?

They just didn’t want to make the hard choices – they didn’t have the guts to admit that they’d been wrong and now, in the 11th hour, the troops have to once again pull this administration’s fat from the fire. And even now, they don’t have the guts to make the hard choices.

The other day, Marty Dempsey told Congress that in his capacity as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, if the situation warranted it, he wouldn’t hesitate to put boots on the ground. I suspect that statement was made to test public opinion on the matter, because we have 300,000,000 opinions to consider when we make foreign and national security policy when we have a populist White House. Anyway, the President reversed the Chairman’s words at MacDill AFB yesterday, according to Fox News;

The White House continued to insist Wednesday that a “combat role” has in fact been ruled out, and that U.S. troops will not be engaging the Islamic State on the ground.

Speaking at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, after visiting U.S. Central Command, Obama told troops: “I will not commit you and the rest of our Armed Forces to fighting another ground war in Iraq.”

He vowed that the U.S. forces currently deployed to Iraq to advise Iraqi forces “will not have a combat mission.” Instead, he said, they will continue to support Iraqi forces on the ground, through a combination of U.S. air power, training assistance and other means.

Can you imagine what the ROE will be when the mission is defined like that? They won’t be involved in combat operations, but they’ll be aside people who are involved in combat operations.

Shortly after Obama spoke, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest clarified that Dempsey was talking about the possible need to put U.S. troops already in Iraq into “forward-deployed positions with Iraqi troops.”

Earnest said that step has not yet been necessary, but if Dempsey asks to “forward deploy” American advisers, “the president said he would consider it on a case-by-case basis.”

Yeah, put that on wallet-sized card.

So, a week since the President promised that he’d guard against “mission creep” and he’d avoid US troops’ “boots on the ground”, Marty Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs mentioned yesterday that he may have to recommend to the President he’d need maneuver units. From Fox News;

“My view at this point is that this coalition is the appropriate way forward,” Dempsey said. “I believe that will prove true, but if it fails to be true and if there are threats to the United States, then I of course would go back to the president and make a recommendation that may include the use of U.S. military ground forces.”

The comment is a departure from what Obama vowed in his address to the nation a week ago, and from what the president’s top spokesman said just one day before Dempsey’s testimony. And it marks the latest mixed message to emerge from the administration on the fight against ISIS, which for weeks U.S. military advisers have described in more urgent and dire terms than others in the administration.

They’ve been slowly cranking up the heat on this pot in which we’ve been boiilng, fellow lobsters. This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard this from the administration – we’re being conditioned to accept the eventuality of deployed combat troops in Iraq.

Dempsey provided one example of a scenario where he might recommend U.S. ground forces, saying they could be used to help Kurdish and Iraqi forces retake Mosul, now controlled by the Islamic State, or ISIS, by accompanying them or providing close-combat advice.

[…]

“This won’t look like a ‘shock and awe’ campaign because that’s simply not how ISIL is organized, but it will be a persistent and sustainable campaign,” Dempsey said.

War by weasel words. By the way, that picture that I keep using for these posts was the “last convoy” out of Iraq – remember those days?