Obama’s Latest Iraq Escalation
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-latest-iraq-escalation-1433977944
The fight against Islamic State needs more than 450 advisers.
President Obama all but admitted on Wednesday that his strategy against the Islamic State is failing by ordering an additional 450 U.S. military advisers to join the 3,500 already in Iraq. Alas, this looks like more of the half-hearted incrementalism that hasn’t worked so far.
The new troops won’t be used as spotters to call in airstrikes against Islamic State, much less join Iraqis at the front lines. Apache helicopters won’t provide air cover for Iraqi soldiers. There won’t be additional special forces to conduct raids against high-value targets. The highest ranking U.S. military officer will remain a mere two-star general.
Instead, the additional advisers will buttress Mr. Obama’s current strategy at the margins by putting Iraqi troops and Sunni tribesmen through a basic training course of between two and four weeks. This may be enough to show recruits how to march in drill and maintain and fire a AK-47.
But as retired four-star Gen. Jack Keane told us Wednesday, while the training is helpful, it “is insufficient to transfer a civilian to the physical, psychological and disciplinary demands of combat. And it doesn’t address the leader issue in terms of quantity or quality.”
That second point is vital, since the Iraqi army suffers from a dearth of competent and courageous leaders, particularly at the tactical levels of command. “We were not deserters,” one soldier told the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Aswat after Mosul fell last June. “Our commanders abandoned us while we were sleeping in the night, and fled by helicopter.”
A similar point concerns the weapons the Administration now wants to rush to the Iraqis, including the Kurdish peshmerga and the Sunni tribes. The Kurds in particular need heavier weapons to deter Islamic State in Iraq’s north. But the danger of delivering stores of American arms to ill-led Iraqi troops has been plain every time they abandoned positions and equipment amid Islamic State advances, most recently during the fall of Ramadi.
Some of these deficiencies could no doubt be addressed by a more robust training program, though 450 more advisers is still too few. General Keane, who was instrumental in devising the surge strategy that saved Iraq in 2007, also makes the case for putting a three-star general in command of the effort—someone with the political clout and organizational pull that made Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno so effective.
Mr. Obama’s mini-escalation includes setting up a new U.S. training base in Anbar province. This is progress, but it would do more good if it became the headquarters of a brigade combat team that would oversee the training and could help the Sunni tribes with medical evacuations, secure travel and force protection. A combat brigade is some 4,000 heavily equipped soldiers.
This kind of deployment would be a show of seriousness of the scale that’s needed to persuade Sunni Arabs to risk their lives against Islamic State. Iraqi soldiers may not have the officers they deserve, but they are still likely to fight if they know there’s an Apache helicopter clearing their advance. That dynamic took hold during the 2007 surge, when American successes emboldened the Iraqis to drive out the Shiite Mahdi Army from the southern city of Basra in 2008.
The fundamental problem with Mr. Obama’s strategy is that he is so determined to show that the U.S. isn’t returning to war in Iraq that he isn’t doing enough to win the war we are fighting. In September he pledged to “degrade” and ultimately “destroy” ISIS—the kind of commitment a U.S. President must never make lightly. But his fitful bombing and timid special-forces campaign hasn’t been able to stop the jihadist advances, much less drive it out of Iraq’s western cities.
Islamic State also isn’t merely an Iraqi problem, as Mr. Obama likes to say by way of minimizing the threat for his domestic political purposes. ISIS is a radiating danger to the region as it attracts new loyalists, and a terror threat to the United States through Internet recruitment and incitement. Since it declared its “caliphate” last June, Islamic State has expanded beyond its bases in Mesopotamia into Lebanon, Libya, Afghanistan and Nigeria.
The longer ISIS stands up to a U.S. President pledging its destruction, the more of a magnet it becomes for young men willing to die for its perverted form of Islam. Every day that ISIS’s army of 30,000 irregulars holds its conquered territory against the world’s most powerful military, it becomes a greater threat to American security.
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