by Mark Gibson
The expectation that the U.S. could wage war effectively in Syria solely from the air, with no “boots on the ground,” was misguided and President Obama and his military advisors should not have promised Americans they would do so.
Yet that promise and expectation should not stop America from putting troops on the ground today.
Experts in Middle East politics have long warned that America's practices and policies in the region — in Israel, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, the list goes on — ran a high risk of igniting a regional conflict that no country or coalition could control.
The war in Syria — and the much broader war against the Islamic State — has had the characteristics of just such a conflict for a long time now. Military air forces of two coalitions are so thick over the skies of Syria they run the very real risk of colliding with each other.
Without “boots on the ground,” America runs the very real risk of misplaced attacks. In the powder keg that is now the Middle East, such an attack could tip the balance further into military and political chaos, perhaps to the point of coalitions not just targeting their respective kill lists on the ground, but directly engaging each other.
Meanwhile, the civilian population in Syria live in the rubble and death of a truly horrific battlefield. Refugees, those with money enough to hire guides, are fleeing in astonishing numbers. They are seeking a better life, preferable one in which a host of nations – and their own government - are not pounding them with missiles, barrel bombs, tanks and worse.
Yes, if America is going to attack Syria from the air, they need boots on the ground to guide those attacks. But should America be on the attack? There is a general agreement, from both sides, that there is no military solution. So why are we still fighting?
Perhaps we have already crossed the tipping point, and are now seeing a regional conflict that no country, or coalition, can control. Our policies in the Middle East, as viewed today, appear to have failed.
None of the trigger points — the Israel/Palestine conflict, failed economies, brutal dictatorships, a lack of hope among civilians —have been addressed. Our decades of military interventions have created more terrorists, not fewer: To the degree we have sought to wage war against terrorism in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, U.S. policies have failed.
That is not to say no gains have been made, or that the sacrifices of our military have been in vain. There are successes, perhaps more than we know, within the broad scope of our actions.
Yet America is not safer and it's time – past time – for us to rethink our strategy against terrorism, much as we have begun to rethink our strategy against crime.
By Raelynn Ricarte
Remember when President Barack Obama referred to terrorists left in Iraq as the “JV team” in an attempt to justify his political decision to remove U.S. combat forces and declare an end to the war?
His Administration now bears responsibility for the fact that the Islamic State, one of the “JV team” is rampaging through Iraq and Syria.
Obama has created a geopolitical nightmare in the Middle East based on his projection of America as being weak and unable to deal with growing threats.
The president may have won re-election with political spin in 2012 but his multiple statements that “Al Qaeda is on the run,” have also been proven false.
Al-Qaeda has morphed and is now networking with the Taliban in Afghanistan, IS in Iraq and has spread into Eastern Africa, Syria and Yemen.
The sad reality is that Al-Qaeda in Iraq was decimated by the end of the war. If Obama had left U.S. troops on the ground to keep the country stable until its military was stronger, this mess might have been containable.
As it is, terrorism is now spreading like wildfire across the Middle East. Obama is now reluctantly having to admit that he can’t take care of the problem without more boots on the ground, something he has repeatedly vowed not to do.
“We will not be sending troops back into combat in Iraq,” said Obama in 2014, a statement he publicy reiterated at least 14 other times.
Even as he uttered those words, 3,300 Marine and special operations teams went into Iraq as “advisors,” a deceiving term since these units are experienced in combat arms. It became a little harder to explain away that reality after Army Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler, a member of Delta Force, was killed in October during a raid in the Iraqi city of Hawijah to free 70 hostages that IS was going to execute.
Any veteran can tell you that, short of dropping a nuclear bomb and not worrying about civilian casualties, you cannot win a war with only airstrikes. You have to secure assets on the ground to stop enemy activity.
And you still can’t win a war when you don’t commit to making sure those assets remained secured.
After air strikes failed to stop IS forces in Syria, Obama announced that a small contingent of special operators would be inserted into the country to aid rebels against Syrian President Barshar al-Assad’s regime.
Fifty men, no matter how well trained, are not going to be able to turn this tide.
For almost seven years the world has witnessed failure after failure of Obama’s foreign policy.
We need to either commit to the mission or stand down.
Sending Americans into harm’s way should not be treated like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if something sticks.
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