Explosions in late 2014 variously described as an ISIL truck bomb or a
U.S. airstrike in the town of Kobane on the Turkish-Syrian border.
Michael Crowley
reports from Washington that there's a push for a new "surge" in Iraq. And guess what? It's being promoted by some of the same imperialist jackasses who proposed the first one in 2007.
The idea this time is to send perhaps 20,000 U.S. troops there and embed them with front-line Iraqi soldiers to fight ISIL, the extremist militants also known as ISIS, the Islamic State and Daesh. Those troops would, goes the talk, rarely engage in combat, but rather work as advisers and trainers as well as spotters for precision U.S. airstrikes:
“It will take accepting risk. It will take accepting casualties,” retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. Keane helped persuade Bush to order his surge of [30,000] troops against the opposition of military commanders who insisted their Iraq strategy was working; Obama opposed that surge but later admitted that it “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”
In an interview with POLITICO, Keane said he supports sending between 10,000 and 20,000 troops to Iraq, primarily to speed up the training of Iraqi forces and tribal fighters in Sunni areas where ISIS is especially strong. His view is backed by another Bush surge architect, Fred Kagan, a military strategist at the American Enterprise Institute, who also discussed the proposal with POLITICO.
Kagan is a good deal more than that. He (along with his father Donald and brother Robert) were all signatories of the 90-page seminal neoconservative document
Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century (2000), which called for a steep rise in military spending and continued global dominance by the United States with emphasis on its "'constabular' duties associated with shaping the security environment." Like other neoconservatives associated with the Project for a New American Century, Fred Kagan was pushing for an attack on Iraq as early as 1998.
Kagan, Sen. John McCain and others who back a new surge in a new form, have all sharply criticized President Obama for bailing on the Iraqis when he ordered the last U.S. combat troops to exit the country in 2011. They've blamed that withdrawal for the emergence of ISIL. And they've credited the original surge with great success, indeed with "winning" the Iraq war. So why not do it again?
Hmmmmm. We "won" the Iraq war? Could have fooled me. Given the convenient amnesia regarding the invasion and occupation being displayed of late by many prominent American hawks, including Jeb Bush, as well as Obama's own unfortunate if reluctant praise for the surge, this revisionism about Iraq should surprise nobody.
In fact, it was Bush who in 2008 signed off on the timeline for combat troop withdrawal and it was the Iraqi government that refused to sign an agreement to allow U.S. forces to remain. More importantly, the surge didn't win the war. It merely helped tamp down the insurgency temporarily.
More on the new surge below the fold.
Other factors besides the surge were at play in what happened in Iraq. The cash-fueled "awakening" of Sunni leaders in Anbar Province who were strongly anti-American but even more fed up with Al Qaeda violence, the targeting and assassination of insurgent leaders and U.S. assistance in ethnic cleansing by separating Sunni and Shia populations in Baghdad and elsewhere were underway well before the surge and all had a significant effect on reducing violence.
The surge also did not change the disastrous trajectory of the invasion and occupation, which grossly damaged U.S. national security, killed hundreds of thousands of people, sucked at least a trillion dollars (possibly three or more times as much) out of the U.S. treasury and laid the groundwork for ISIL's creation. Without the invasion, no ISIL.
For a while, the surge inflated the reputation of Gen. David Petraeus and others associated with it, and it seems to have been a factor in persuading Obama to launch what is arguably his worst foreign policy move, the surges totaling 68,000 more U.S. troops sent to Afghanistan in 2009.
The idea that adding 10,000 or 20,000 troops to the 3,000 Obama has already sent to Iraq will make the difference in the ongoing fight there is another neoconservative wet-dream. It is based on the myth that the original surge actually worked to do anything other than eat up lives, suck up tax money and jack up profits. It didn't. And neither will a new one.