President Obama Must Change Course against ISIL, Offer a Real Strategy





Editorials: President Obama Must Change Course against ISIL, Offer a Real Strategy

May 20, 2015|Matt Wolking

The Obama administration may be ceding swaths of ground to the Islamic State (ISIL) from Iraq to Libya, but it’s refusing to budge in the briefing room. Despite the fall of Ramadi – which resulted in mass killings and the deaths of up to 500 people, both Iraqi civilians and soldiers – White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest insisted that the president’s strategy has been an overall success. “Are we going to light our hair on fire every time that there is a setback in the campaign against ISIL?” Earnest shot back at skeptical reporters. If this is what success looks like, let’s hope we never see what would set off alarm bells in the White House. Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said they should already be blaring, as he called the recent events in Iraq “a very serious and significant setback.” Editorials boards and outside experts agree: it’s time for President Obama to change course and end the half-measures. “It has been apparent for some time that the United States lacks a strategy to fulfill President Obama’s pledge to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ the Islamic State …. Mr. Obama will not permit U.S. trainers to work with Iraqi forces on the ground or send U.S. spotters to make airstrikes more useful. … [H]e refuses to commit the Special Forces and military assistance that could meet that threat, portraying any alternative to his minimalist policy as being ‘dragged back into another prolonged ground war.’ … [I]t is Mr. Obama’s unwillingness to match means to strategy that threatens to prolong this war.” (The Washington Post) “President Obama's pledge last year that the U.S. would ‘degrade, and ultimately destroy’ the Islamic State contained more than a touch of bravado. It depended, after all, on the effectiveness of Iraqi troops whose performance against the Islamist extremists had been disgraceful. … In short, the campaign to degrade and destroy the Islamic State is hardly any further along today than it was when Obama announced it.” (The Denver Post) “Ramadi’s fall undercuts White House and Pentagon assurances that the war against Islamic State is going well. The reality is that the political limitations that the White House has put on U.S. military planners have allowed ISIS to hold or retake most of its ground. Half-hearted wars rarely end in victory.” (The Wall Street Journal) “The seizure of Ramadi on Sunday leaves President Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State in ruins not only in Iraq but also throughout the Muslim world. … This defeat was avoidable. … This is what happens when a policy of half-measures, restrictions and posturing meets a skillful and determined enemy on the battlefield. If the president does not change course soon, he will find that his legacy is not peace with Iran and ending wars, but rather the establishment of a terrorist state with the resources to conduct devastating attacks against the United States and a region-engulfing sectarian war. … Setbacks against the Islamic State in Iraq might not be so devastating if the United States and its allies were on the offensive against that group elsewhere. The president’s plan, unfortunately, confined our efforts almost exclusively to Iraq. In the meantime, the group has managed to gain adherents in the Sinai, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and even further abroad, as part of its strategy to remain in Iraq and Syria and expand the caliphate. … The choice facing Obama is not between a massive deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops and a tightly constrained mission of under-resourced forces. It is, rather, between the serious application of a limited amount of U.S. military power and the establishment of a terrorist state.” (Kimberly Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan, The Washington Post) “The ISIS takeover of Ramadi in the Anbar province over the weekend exposed the hollowness of the reported progress against ISIS. The U.S.-led bombing campaign in support of Iraqi forces isn’t working. Clearly, the Iraqi government needs greater military assistance if it is to defeat what is proving to be a formidable enemy. … [U.S.-led airstrikes are] not enough. The U.S. needs to play a more robust role against ISIS before conditions in Iraq deteriorate further. … Moreover, the Pentagon needs to end the ‘boots on the ground’ shell game of relying on temporary deployments to work around the president’s 3,000 personnel cap, which has proved dysfunctional. Most of the U.S. troops currently in Iraq are training and advising Iraqi forces. That is useful, but more need to be embedded with Iraqi units to improve the accuracy of U.S.-led airstrikes. … What is needed is decisive U.S. leadership. Without it, the long-term entrenchment of Islamic State in Iraq may become a disturbing reality.” (Norman Ricklefs and Derek Harvey, The Wall Street Journal) “Islamic State's capture of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, may well lead to the unraveling of President Barack Obama's Iraq strategy. … [The end of any hope for a unified Iraq] would be a disaster for the region and U.S. interests. … To this point, U.S. efforts to train and advise Iraqi forces have been hamstrung by rules barring American personnel from accompanying their charges into battle in noncombat roles. Iran has increased its influence immeasurably by sending its officers to the front lines. U.S. personnel in forward positions could improve coordination with American air support, as well as provide on-the-ground protection against civilian atrocities.” (Bloomberg) “The Islamic State … has won a stunning victory with the collapse of the Iraqi army and the conquest of Ramadi and Anbar. The attempt by the Obama administration to spin it any other way is foolish. The loss is an enormous gain for the forces of radical Islamic terrorism. … If, as seems probable now, Ramadi’s reconquest will be undertaken by Shia militias allied with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, this will be another step to bring Iraq and its vast oil and gas reserves into a subservient satellite relationship with the mullahs in Tehran. Attempts by the White House to minimize the strategic and tactical defeat … are foolish and impress no one. More than two-dozen airstrikes after the fact may impress some critics of the Obama administration’s offensive against the Islamic terrorism that the president cannot bring himself to call by its true name, but spin is never a substitute for a strategy. It will take more than spin to stop a menace that is swiftly becoming more than a regional conflict and threatens the peace of the larger world.” (The Washington Times) “The world has again seen the image of … the brutal slaughter and enslavement of civilians that always follow in the wake of Islamic State conquests. ISIL is making good on its vision of being a quasi-state, taking, holding and governing vast territories in Iraq and Syria. Perceptions are critical in irregular wars, and the perception in the region is that the Islamic State is winning. ISIL now openly controls the Iraqi cities of Ramadi, Fallujah and Mosul, which is more than its parent al-Qaeda franchise could ever have claimed at the height of its insurgency. It is a sobering fact that all the gains made during the execution of the coalition's 2007 ‘surge’ strategy that pacified western Iraq have been given back to the extremists. … Meanwhile ISIL continues to make gains in Syria and is exporting its insurgency to other countries. It continues to recruit international jihadis to either fight in Syria or Iraq, or to encourage terrorism elsewhere, including the United States. … [I]f the Islamic State is losing right now, you wouldn't know from looking at a map.” (James Robbins, USA TODAY) “Fighting ISIS will require a much more robust response than has been utilized thus far. … There is a step between the tepid actions now ongoing and redeploying large conventional American formations. … The tide must be turned on ISIS. If the Iraqis can’t get the muscle to do it from the United States, they will get it from Iran. Vacillation by the Obama administration is leading Iraq to a choice between radical Sunni-Islamist ISIS, and radical Shia-Islamist Iran. Either outcome is disastrous for Iraq and for the interests of America.” (Steven Bucci, The National Interest) “The U.S. urgently needs to reappraise its current strategic posture in both Iraq and Syria. It needs far more realism in shaping its military efforts and far more honesty and transparency in assessing the risks of those decisions. … The Obama administration’s limited U.S. effort … did more in Iraq to empower Iran than win support for the U.S. … As is the case with Afghanistan and earlier with Yemen, the administration has failed to provide any honest transparency about the impact of the limits to its present strategy, the train and assist mission, the real world course of the fighting, and the risks and cost benefits of the present form of U.S. military intervention. There have been no substantive plans, risk assessments, or progress reporting – just spin, positive claims and vacuous reports like that of the lead inspector general over the conflict, which totally failed to say anything meaningful about the progress of the war. It is all too clear that the present U.S. air and train and assist campaigns are not enough. What is totally unclear is that administration has a viable strategy[.]” (Anthony Cordesman, Defense One) As Speaker Boehner said yesterday, “Hope is not a strategy. The president’s plan isn’t working, it’s time for him to come up with a real, overarching strategy to defeat the ongoing terrorist threat.”

The Guardian


 














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