America’s Secret Boots on the Ground
By Max Boot
Commentary
April 7, 2016
Ever since President Obama sent U.S. forces back to Iraq in August, 2014 to fight ISIS — a terrorist group that grew up in the vacuum that he left by pulling U.S. troops out at the end of 2011 — the president has repeatedly promised that U.S. troops would not go into combat. By last fall, he had uttered some variation of the phrase “no boots on the ground” at least sixteen times. On September 10, 2014, for example, he said: “I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”
Perhaps the president would like to — as they say in Congress — go back to “revise and extend” his remarks? Because it sure looks by any reasonable standard that the U.S. has “boots on the ground” and, indeed, in combat.
Last fall, the Defense Department moved a Joint Special Operations Task Force to Iraq to begin targeting ISIS leaders. Last month, the commandos captured a man described as head of ISIS’s chemical weapons program. It goes without saying that when the “operators” — whether Delta Force or SEAL Team Six or some other unit — go onto the “objective,” they are in combat: they are likely to be inflicting and risking casualties.
More recently, a U.S. Marine Corps staff sergeant was killed in Iraq. Only his death prompted the Pentagon to announce that the Marine Corps had now established a fire base in northern Iraq, now known as the Kara Soar Counter Fire Complex. The stated rationale for this fire base is to provide artillery fire in support of U.S. advisers. In reality, it is providing artillery fire in support of an Iraqi army advance on Mosul. The Marine artillery can provide all-weather targeting even when aircraft are grounded. Providing fire support is definitely a combat mission, and the Marines are definitely at risk of retaliatory action by ISIS.
This is only the combat action that we know about, of course. The odds are that there are more Special Operations Forces and CIA paramilitaries on the front-lines, with the military personnel possibly “sheep dipped” (i.e., temporarily transferred) into the CIA so that they can operate under the spy agency’s secret authorities.
Just how many U.S. troops are in Iraq? The official story is that the number is limited to 3,870. But the Washington Post reported that the real figure is around 5,000. Apparently the U.S. command has played some cute arithmetic with “temporary” and “permanent” deployments to limit the number that is publicly divulged.
In short, there is a substantial and growing U.S. combat commitment on the ground in Iraq, to say nothing of all the aircraft flying an average of 14 strike sorties a day. This is not President Bush’s deployment of more than 100,000 troops to Iraq, but it’s a lot more than Obama initially promised.
Apparently President Obama has quietly decided to ramp up the U.S. commitment against ISIS by relaxing the rules limiting how many U.S. personnel can be in Iraq and what they can do. That’s a good thing. He should show more flexibility by sending even more troops to accelerate the anti-ISIS campaign. But it’s unfortunate that he is doing so in secret because there is no good reason for secrecy unless he is simply afraid of the political blowback at home.
If Obama were to come clean about what he’s doing, he would have to admit that the Iraq War didn’t end when he pulled U.S. troops out in 2011. In fact, that decision restarted the war and, as critics of the pullout warned, led U.S. forces back into combat in Iraq under less advantageous circumstances. The president would have to admit, moreover, that all of his previous assurances about U.S. troops not engaging in ground combat are — in in the Nixonian formulation — “inoperative.” And that is something very hard to imagine the cocksure president doing.
But Obama should swallow his pride and level with the American people. Most Americans would, I think, support this war effort, but it needs to be explained to them rather than hidden from view like an ugly stain on the president’s antiwar record.
Ever since President Obama sent U.S. forces back to Iraq in August, 2014 to fight ISIS — a terrorist group that grew up in the vacuum that he left by pulling U.S. troops out at the end of 2011 — the president has repeatedly promised that U.S. troops would not go into combat. By last fall, he had uttered some variation of the phrase “no boots on the ground” at least sixteen times. On September 10, 2014, for example, he said: “I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”
Perhaps the president would like to — as they say in Congress — go back to “revise and extend” his remarks? Because it sure looks by any reasonable standard that the U.S. has “boots on the ground” and, indeed, in combat.
Last fall, the Defense Department moved a Joint Special Operations Task Force to Iraq to begin targeting ISIS leaders. Last month, the commandos captured a man described as head of ISIS’s chemical weapons program. It goes without saying that when the “operators” — whether Delta Force or SEAL Team Six or some other unit — go onto the “objective,” they are in combat: they are likely to be inflicting and risking casualties.
More recently, a U.S. Marine Corps staff sergeant was killed in Iraq. Only his death prompted the Pentagon to announce that the Marine Corps had now established a fire base in northern Iraq, now known as the Kara Soar Counter Fire Complex. The stated rationale for this fire base is to provide artillery fire in support of U.S. advisers. In reality, it is providing artillery fire in support of an Iraqi army advance on Mosul. The Marine artillery can provide all-weather targeting even when aircraft are grounded. Providing fire support is definitely a combat mission, and the Marines are definitely at risk of retaliatory action by ISIS.
This is only the combat action that we know about, of course. The odds are that there are more Special Operations Forces and CIA paramilitaries on the front-lines, with the military personnel possibly “sheep dipped” (i.e., temporarily transferred) into the CIA so that they can operate under the spy agency’s secret authorities.
Just how many U.S. troops are in Iraq? The official story is that the number is limited to 3,870. But the Washington Post reported that the real figure is around 5,000. Apparently the U.S. command has played some cute arithmetic with “temporary” and “permanent” deployments to limit the number that is publicly divulged.
In short, there is a substantial and growing U.S. combat commitment on the ground in Iraq, to say nothing of all the aircraft flying an average of 14 strike sorties a day. This is not President Bush’s deployment of more than 100,000 troops to Iraq, but it’s a lot more than Obama initially promised.
Apparently President Obama has quietly decided to ramp up the U.S. commitment against ISIS by relaxing the rules limiting how many U.S. personnel can be in Iraq and what they can do. That’s a good thing. He should show more flexibility by sending even more troops to accelerate the anti-ISIS campaign. But it’s unfortunate that he is doing so in secret because there is no good reason for secrecy unless he is simply afraid of the political blowback at home.
If Obama were to come clean about what he’s doing, he would have to admit that the Iraq War didn’t end when he pulled U.S. troops out in 2011. In fact, that decision restarted the war and, as critics of the pullout warned, led U.S. forces back into combat in Iraq under less advantageous circumstances. The president would have to admit, moreover, that all of his previous assurances about U.S. troops not engaging in ground combat are — in in the Nixonian formulation — “inoperative.” And that is something very hard to imagine the cocksure president doing.
But Obama should swallow his pride and level with the American people. Most Americans would, I think, support this war effort, but it needs to be explained to them rather than hidden from view like an ugly stain on the president’s antiwar record.
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