Send Boots on the ground to deal with ISIS?

[Gargantua]

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/isis-knocks-on-turkeys-door/ar-BB83BOI

Turks don’t want to go in for a few different reasons.  How disappointing… :(

Predicitions are flying that 5,000 civilians will be executed within 24 - 48 hours of total ISIS take over of Kobani.

[General Veers]

Hate to say it but maybe higher-ups don’t in Ankara mind ISIS thinning the Kurdish population since they’ve had so many problems with them over the years.

[Redleg13A]

It is a matter of time before western soldiers start doing offensive operations… I imagine the US is going to wait until after the poll results comein next month…

There is movement…that’s all I can say…

[LHoffman]

@Redleg13A:

There is movement…that’s all I can say…

Are you on the inside to some extent? Military or otherwise?

[Redleg13A]

I am in the US Army and have been for 13 years…I have many friends at many military posts…and lots of orders are showing up saying “somewhere in CENTCOM”.

I recieved similar orders stating the same such words in January of 2003…

A word of advice too, the more the politicians deny something, the more likely it is going to happen. Look for the narrative to start to change about boots on the ground (it already has to an extent)…once everyone is nice and comfy in their new, or old, political offices about 15 Nov, you will see a much more aggressive call to action. You’ll see.

[LHoffman]

@Redleg13A:

I am in the US Army and have been for 13 years…I have many friends at many military posts…and lots of orders are showing up saying “somewhere in CENTCOM”.

I recieved similar orders stating the same such words in January of 2003…

A word of advice too, the more the politicians deny something, the more likely it is going to happen. Look for the narrative to start to change about boots on the ground (it already has to an extent)…once everyone is nice and comfy in their new, or old, political offices about 15 Nov, you will see a much more aggressive call to action. You’ll see.

I really despise politicking, plausible deniability and optical maneuvering… really despise it. I keep banging my head against a metaphorical wall wishing it would stop, but I think it is an unfortunate eternal reality. And it isn’t just politicians but executives and lawyers and anyone in a position of power with something to lose/gain because of it. It is a cycle of deception and/or head-in-sand mentality that is trickling down to the general public. It is rapidly becoming a very dangerous thing.

I can imagine that it is even worse for someone in the military (the frustration). Or have you just learned to accept it?

[Redleg13A]

You just learn to accept it and try to salvage what you can. Hope for the best and plan for the worst.

There is such a thing as rushing to failure…I  honestly would prefer more time to give guys like me more time to prepare and train…rushing over their, letting our emotions drive us and then lead to failure would be exponentially worse than creating a solid plan, mobilizing the needed forces, establishing lasting alliances, and ensuring proper funding and support so the slaughter can come to a stop in full. If it sounds cold and calculated, it is…it also saves lives.

[MightyChris]

@Redleg13A:

I am in the US Army and have been for 13 years…I have many friends at many military posts…and lots of orders are showing up saying “somewhere in CENTCOM”.

I recieved similar orders stating the same such words in January of 2003…

A word of advice too, the more the politicians deny something, the more likely it is going to happen. Look for the narrative to start to change about boots on the ground (it already has to an extent)…once everyone is nice and comfy in their new, or old, political offices about 15 Nov, you will see a much more aggressive call to action. You’ll see.

Possibly… although, if you believe that Obama is doing air strikes simply to shift the media narrative away from “we’re doing nothing,” to “we’re bombing them, see, we’re doing something,” and that the President is merely a political opportunist who is deeply uninterested in defense policy, then don’t expect to see boots on the ground.

I’m not saying you’re right, but I’ve seen enough WARNORDs that never turned into EXORDs to think that this could all be smoke to shift the political narrative.

[variance]

America should go the hell home and leave the middle east alone, but if they really must bomb someone maybe they should nuke Israel off the map and get that whole mess over there resolved once and for all.

[MightyChris]

Glad we have folks advocating for a second Holocaust on the boards…

[LHoffman]

@Redleg13A:

There is such a thing as rushing to failure…I� honestly would prefer more time to give guys like me more time to prepare and train…rushing over their, letting our emotions drive us and then lead to failure would be exponentially worse than creating a solid plan, mobilizing the needed forces, establishing lasting alliances, and ensuring proper funding and support so the slaughter can come to a stop in full. If it sounds cold and calculated, it is…it also saves lives.

Oh, I do agree. Calculation over rash action 98% of the time. I would not advocate going over there just to show action to our public or to the world; that is inefficient, disingenuous and dangerous. Either way, politicians stalling or rushing or deflecting creates problems and is not in the best interests of victory or saving lives. That is what I have a problem with: wasted and misguided action/inaction.

[MightyChris]

From today’s NY Times.  I can’t post a link, so here is the text.

FIFTY years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized a strategic bombing campaign against targets in North Vietnam, an escalation of the conflict in Southeast Asia that was swiftly followed by the deployment of American ground troops. Last month, President Obama expanded a strategic bombing campaign against Islamic insurgents in the Middle East, escalating the attack beyond Iraq into Syria.

Will Mr. Obama repeat history and commit ground troops? Many analysts believe so, and top officials are calling for it. But the president has expressed skepticism about what American force can accomplish in this kind of struggle, and he has resisted the urgings of hawks inside and outside the administration who want him to go in deeper. Mr. Obama, his supporters say, is a “gloomy realist” who has learned history’s lesson: that American military power, no matter how great in relative terms, is ultimately of limited utility in conflicts that are, at their root, political or ideological in nature.

It’s a powerful, reasoned position, amply supported by the history of America’s involvement in Vietnam. But that history also shows that a president’s attitude and analytical assessment, no matter how gloomily realistic, are not necessarily an antidote to ill-advised military action. Foreign intervention has a logic all to itself.

Today we think of Lyndon Johnson as a man unwaveringly committed to prevailing in Vietnam. But at least at first, he shared Mr. Obama’s pessimism. He and his advisers knew they faced an immense challenge in attempting to suppress the insurgency in South Vietnam. “A man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere,” he said privately in early March 1965. “But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam.”

Johnson also knew that the Democratic leadership in the Senate shared his misgivings, and that key allied governments counseled against escalation and in favor of a political solution.

On occasion the president even allowed himself to question whether the outcome in Vietnam really mattered to American and Western security. “What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?” he despaired in 1964, even as he was laying plans to expand American involvement. “What’s it worth to this country?”

At other times Johnson was quite capable of arguing for the geopolitical importance of the struggle — he was adept at tailoring his Vietnam analysis to his needs of the moment. But the overall picture that emerges in the administration’s massive internal record for 1964-65 is of a president deeply skeptical that the war could be won, even with large-scale escalation, and far from certain that it was necessary even to try.

So why did Johnson take the plunge? In part because he was hemmed in — not merely by 15 years of steadily growing American involvement in Indochina, but, more important, by his own and his advisers’ use of overheated rhetoric to describe the stakes in Vietnam and their confidence in victory. Moreover, he had personalized the war, and saw any criticism of its progress as an attack on him, compromising his ability to see the conflict objectively.

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We know the results. In the very week in which he professed to see “no daylight” in the struggle, Johnson initiated Operation Rolling Thunder, the graduated, sustained aerial bombardment against North Vietnam; also that week, he dispatched the first combat troops. More soon followed, and by the end of 1965, some 180,000 men were on the ground in South Vietnam. Ultimately, the count would top half a million.

Continue reading the main story

Recent Comments

R.
3 hours ago
Syria is Obama’s Rwanda.

Mike Roddy
13 hours ago
Your last quote from Johnson is correct, and applies to today’s situation in Iraq and Syria. Deploying ground troops there would be a…

Ed
16 hours ago
To compare President Johnson to President Obama is ridiculous. Personalities do matter; personal life experiences do matter. Johnson was in…

See All Comments

True, it’s hard to imagine Mr. Obama ordering a Johnson-style surge of combat forces to Iraq or Syria. The circumstances on the ground are dissimilar, and he sees the world and America’s role in it differently than Johnson did. By all accounts he is less inclined to personalize foreign policy tests, and less threatened by diverse views among his advisers.

In these respects he is much closer in his sensibility and approach to another Vietnam-era president, John F. Kennedy. He consistently rejected the proposals of civilian aides and military leaders to commit combat forces to Vietnam, but he also significantly expanded American involvement in the conflict during his thousand days in office, complicating the choices open to his successor. Whether he could have continued to walk that line, as Mr. Obama is trying to do, is an unanswerable question.

But the point is not about biography; rather, it’s about the inability of a president, once committed to military intervention, to control the course of events. War has a forward motion of its own. Most of Johnson’s major steps in the escalation in Vietnam were in response to unforeseen obstacles, setbacks and shortcomings. There’s no reason the same dynamic couldn’t repeat itself in 2014.

And there is a political logic, too: Then as now, the president faced unrelenting pressure from various quarters to do more, to fight the fight, to intensify the battle. Then as now, the alarmist rhetoric by the president and senior officials served to reduce their perceived maneuverability, not least in domestic political terms. Johnson was no warmonger, and he feared, rightly, that Vietnam would be his undoing. Nonetheless, he took his nation into a protracted struggle that ended in bitter defeat.

“I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out,” a sullen Johnson told McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, in 1964. One can only hope the same sentiment is not being expressed in the Oval Office today.

[variance]

@MightyChris:

Glad we have folks advocating for a second Holocaust on the boards…

You mean the ones advocating a holocaust of the arabs and palestinians?  I don’t think it right for America or Israel to go around bombing anyone.

[MightyChris]

You need to look up the definition of a Holocaust, buddy.

Do you honestly not understand the difference between targeted strikes using precision munitions, and advocating using nuclear weapons to wipe an entire nation “off the map” in order to get the whole mess resolved “once and for all?”  Your words–eerily reminiscent of a “final solution” even.

[CWO Marc]

@LHoffman:

I really despise politicking, plausible deniability and optical maneuvering… really despise it. I keep banging my head against a metaphorical wall wishing it would stop, but I think it is an unfortunate eternal reality. And it isn’t just politicians but executives and lawyers and anyone in a position of power with something to lose/gain because of it. It is a cycle of deception and/or head-in-sand mentality that is trickling down to the general public.

Politics are inevitably messy, and as you say they’re one of those unavoidable frustrations in life – but if it’s any consolation, politics in truly democratic states (I’m excluding states which claim to be democratic but actually aren’t, like the various People’s Democratic Republics of Whatever that existed a few decades ago) are at least messy in some better ways than they are in totalitarian dictatorships.

As just one minor example: several years ago, when Saddaam Hussein was still in power, he ran for reelection as President (or whatever his nominal title was), and afterwards he boasted that Iraq’s democracy was far better than that of the United States because in contrast with the US, where many eligible voters don’t bother to cast ballots, the Iraqi people had participated with a 100% turnout at the polls, and had reelected him with a 100% majority.  Roughly around the same, as I recall, there was a US Presidential election and the incumbent (I can’t remember who was in office at the time) lost his bid for reelection.  As the law stipulates, he handed the White House over to his successor a couple of months later on inauguration day.  No shooting, no coup d’etat, no revolution, no troops or tanks deployed in American streets to quell disorder – and nobody taking any special notice of this peaceful transition of power, because everyone is accustomed to seeing matters handled in that way when a new American President takes office and few people stop to think that, in many parts of the world, such a routine changeover in such a powerful elected office would be unthinkable.  Washington DC continued to be a very messy place, of course, and it will always remain so – but at least it’s not run by dictators-for-life like Saddaam Hussein who add insult to injury by claiming that they were reelected fair and square by 100% of their country’s citizens.  I think Winston Churchill once said that democracy’s only redeeming feature is that it was better than all the alternatives, which is an interesting way of looking at the subject.

[LHoffman]

@variance:

You mean the ones advocating a holocaust of the arabs and palestinians? �I don’t think it right for America or Israel to go around bombing anyone.

I don’t think anyone here is advocating that and you are a sharp enough guy to know better. You are just baiting a political argument. Actually, I did vote for the nuke 'em option in this poll, truth be told. But that conveys a frustration of “Oh, F–- it all… I don’t know what to do anymore.” rather than an actual desire to kill everyone over there.

As for Israel, they are not posting videos of beheading civilians, executing mass numbers of prisoners or deliberately suicide bombing school children. ISIS/Al-Qaeda/Hezbollah/Boko Haram etc… do.

I would say it is pretty clear who the bad guys are.

[LHoffman]

@CWO:

I think Winston Churchill once said that democracy’s only redeeming feature is that it was better than all the alternatives, which is an interesting way of looking at the subject.

And he was right.

[variance]

@LHoffman:

I would say it is pretty clear who the bad guys are.

Not so clear who the good guys are.

[MightyChris]

So says the guy who is literally advocating using nuclear weapons to “wipe out” a race of people “once and for all.”

[LHoffman]

@variance:

@LHoffman:

I would say it is pretty clear who the bad guys are.

Not so clear who the good guys are.

Correct also. However, we at least have guarantees on a couple of the known good guys. And the bad guys end up showing themselves at some point.