Drip, drip, drip... Its so predictable that its little short of painful. As yesterday ended, there were the first reports that President Obama was planning to send another 1,500 U.S. military personnel into Iraq. Into embattled Anbar Province, among other places, according to the latest reports, there is actual ground being fought over on which boots more or less have to land. This will make an official 3,100 advisers and others in the new U.S. escalation contingent in that country. And dont think it will end there either! Oh, and for a bit of incidental humor, an unnamed senior administration official denies that this is mission creep. (Maybe they are upping the mission too fast for it to be considered creep. How about leap?) Tom Pentagon officials said Friday that military advisers would establish training sites across Iraq in a significant expansion of the American military campaign in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State. A Defense Department official said that a number of military personnel would deploy specifically to Anbar Province, the Sunni stronghold in western Iraq that was the scene of bloody fighting for years after the 2003 American-led invasion. In recent months Sunni militants with the Islamic State have been seizing and holding territory across Anbar. In addition, White House budget officials said they would ask Congress for $5 billion for military operations in the Middle East against the Islamic State, including $1.6 billion to train and equip Iraqi troops. At its height in 2006 and 2007, the Iraq war was costing the United States more than $60 billion a year. Administration officials said the expanded effort was intended to help the Iraqis break the Islamic State’s occupation in northern and western Iraq, re-establish the government’s control over the country’s major roads and borders, and retake Mosul, a city of about a million people 250 miles north of Baghdad. The timing of the announcement — three days after the midterm elections — raised the question of whether the administration, wary of angering a war-weary American public, decided to wait until after the elections to minimize further damage to Democratic candidates. For several weeks now, administration officials have said they expected they would have to send additional American troops to help the Iraqi forces, who initially disintegrated in the face of the rampaging Islamic State. nytimes/2014/11/08/world/middleeast/us-to-send-1500-more-troops-to-iraq.html
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 14:00:00 +0000
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