![\"last](\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/last-convoy-out-of-Iraq.jpg\")
<\/a><\/center><\/p>\nIn the Washington Post, by way of the Stars & Stripes<\/a>, they describe the tug-of-war between the White House and the Pentagon over the use of troops in Iraq;<\/p>\n [A] series of military leaders have criticized the president’s approach against the Islamic State militant group.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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<\/a>‘s David Ignatius reports that James Clapper is making excuses that they had underestimated the Islamic State;<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we didn\u2019t do was predict the will to fight. That\u2019s always a problem. We didn\u2019t 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\u2019t see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming. I didn\u2019t see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"