Our IS Strategy Seems Another Half-Hearted War Effort
IBDEditorials.com
War On Terror: Has our strategy against IS been "lost in Washington ... even before the first American units were deployed," to quote a famous explanation of our Vietnam defeat? We hope not, but it might be so.
In his extraordinary book on why the U.S. lost in Vietnam, "Dereliction of Duty," Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster — recently named director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, Training and Doctrine Command — found the White House advisers to JFK and LBJ to be, from the start, arrogant, devious and contemptuous of the military's expertise. Especially "whiz kid" Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
But McMaster didn't let the brass off the hook, either, accusing the Joint Chiefs of meekness, lethargy and peddling disinformation back and forth between the White House and the military.
In the National Geographic special "American War Generals," which premiered this week, the esteemed military strategist said of Iraq, "We didn't have enough forces for what the situation required, and we didn't adapt fast enough," evoking the ghosts of Vietnam.
President Bush, of course, changed that with the surge, placing Gen. David Petraeus in charge, sending tens of thousands of new U.S. troops and working more closely with the Iraqi people.
Bush handed over to incoming President Obama a war that was essentially won. But the new president wanted out, supposedly because the resources were needed in "the war we have to win," as he put it, in Afghanistan. Then he withdrew our troops from Afghanistan, too, and now the Taliban are returning to power.
Seeing that the world's lone superpower was not going to be any trouble in Iraq or Syria, al-Qaida, believed vanquished, became ISIS, marched into Iraq this summer, and has formed a new Islamofascist monster.
When Obama last week told the world that the U.S. commitment was extremely limited, locking us into the doctrine that "we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq," his words amounted to losing yet another war in Washington. The lessons that Gen. McMaster gave us seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
And the "broad coalition" of a couple dozen countries who met in Paris this week to say they would support Iraq against IS "by any means necessary" are armed with nothing beyond those strong-sounding words because of the president's self-imposed restrictions.
This is not how the military advised the president to handle IS, and the echoes of McNamara are resonating within the West Wing. Centcom commander Gen. Lloyd Austin advised use of U.S. special-ops ground troops to help the less-than-dependable Iraqi Army.
The Washington Post quoted Austin's predecessor, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, warning that holding back will again mean "a war that doesn't seem to be making progress ... giving the enemy the initiative for a longer period."
Sending young Americans into war is the gravest decision, but McMaster's research revealed that in Vietnam the White House and top brass lacked the commitment to win. Americans dying in a half-hearted war effort is a crime and sadly seems to be about to happen again.