Mission creep: Obama says U.S. will send up to 450 more troops to train Iraqis to better fight ISIL

Meteor Blades

Daily Kos Staff

Wednesday June 10, 2015 · 11:10 AM PDT

2015/06/10 · 11:10

Kurdish Peshmerga tank near Kirkuk.

The White House announced Wednesday that it will send more U.S. troops to Iraq to provide advice, training and assistance in the fight against ISIL, the extremist militants also known as ISIS, the Islamic State and Daesh:

To improve the capabilities and effectiveness of partners on the ground, the President authorized the deployment of up to 450 additional U.S. military personnel to train, advise, and assist Iraqi Security Forces at Taqaddum military base in eastern Anbar province. The President made this decision after a request from Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi and upon the recommendation of Secretary Carter and Chairman Dempsey, and with the unanimous support of his national security team. These new advisors will work to build capacity of Iraqi forces, including local tribal fighters, to improve their ability to plan, lead, and conduct operations against ISIL in eastern Anbar under the command of the Prime Minister. This effort will complement the ‎efforts of U.S. and coalition trainers at the four previously-established training sites in Al-Asad, Besmaya, Erbil, and Taji, where over 9,000 Iraqi troops have already been trained, with an additional 3,000 currently in training. These additional U.S. troops will not serve in a combat role and will augment the 3,100 U.S. troops who have already deployed to Iraq.

If this sounds like a bad idea, it is. If you're thinking this will not be the last increase in U.S. troops sent to the region, you're not alone. If you're wondering when will we ever learn, don't make any wagers on its being soon.

The United States says its 10-month-old airstrike campaigns in Iraq and Syria have cost ISIL 10,000 or more fighters. If true, it's an indication of how far off the estimates of ISIL strength were last September when the CIA put their numbers at 20,000 to 31,000. If that estimate were accurate and the body-count is, too, it would mean a third to half of ISIL's fighters have been killed at a time when the organization has expanded its footprint in both Iraq and Syria. One of those estimates—quite possibly both—is off the mark. Which should be no surprise because, until last month's capture by ISIL of Ramadi, capital of Anbar Province, the Pentagon said the group was on the defensive.

Retaking Ramadi is the key objective of the trainers, who are likely to be embedded with Iraqi combat forces, making the Americans vulnerable to casualties. Six American military personnel have died in Iraq since 2012.

There's more on this story below tangled orange web.

Michael R. Gordon at The New York Times reports that the plan to send more troops:

follows months of behind-the-scenes debate about how prominently plans to retake Mosul, another Iraqi city that fell to the Islamic State last year, should figure in the early phase of the military campaign against the group.
The fall of Ramadi last month effectively settled the administration debate, at least for the time being. American officials said Ramadi was now expected to become the focus of a lengthy campaign to regain Mosul at a later stage, possibly not until 2016.

The administration has been heavily criticized from both right and antiwar left over its actions in the region. On the right, the call has been for more: more bombing, more drone strikes, more troops. For example, Lindsey Graham, a GOP presidential wannabe, has called for 10,000 U.S. troops to engage directly with ISIL.

On the left, the criticism goes the other way. Phyllis Bemis is the director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Her latest book is Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror: A Primer. Here's an excerpt from her June 5 interview with Sharmini Peries, executive producer at The Real News Network:

You know, again, the U.S. has for so long relied on military strategies that have not worked. You know, we were hearing in Syria back in 2012 and 2013, we've got to send U.S. troops, U.S. bombers, U.S. bombs, U.S. weapons, U.S. training to go after Assad, because the Assad regime is the worst possible thing anyone can imagine.
And then suddenly that had taken over from the we have to send troops, we have to send bombs, we have to send bombers. We have to send helicopter gunships against al-Qaeda. Because now the Assad regime was worse than al-Qaeda. But suddenly we now have ISIS on the move. And ISIS is now worse than the Assad regime. So the U.S. is going after ISIS in ways that objectively, I don't think they're collaborating deliberately in the sense of, you know, somebody's calling President Assad and saying, hey, this is the Pentagon, let's work together. But objectively U.S. military strategy in Syria is aiding the Assad regime. It's enabling it to survive better than it would have without that U.S. support.

So everything the U.S. is doing right now is making the situation worse. Not making it better. It's aimed at, as somebody described it the other day, it's like a game of whack-a-mole. [...]

So it's a hugely complicated situation which is never going to be dealt with correctly by more military support. That's the problem. As long as we keep saying we have to do the military stuff better, we have to do more weapons, we have to do more training, we have to change the training, we have to train this group rather than that group, it's not going to work. It hasn't worked yet. And it simply isn't going to work, because every one of those military actions ends up creating more anger, more opposition, even in those rare occasions when the U.S. gets the person they're actually aiming at rather than 15 innocent civilians who happen to be surrounding them.

Another 450 trainers-cum-advisers-cum-assisters are supposed to get the Iraqi Army up to snuff more quickly than it has done so far. Given all the money and time that has been devoted over the past few years training that army, this objective sounds like a very, very bad joke.

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