You Don’t always Need a Strategy — but Sometimes You Do — President Obama’s Violent Vacuity in the Middle East

23 March 2016

The President reportedly recently sent about 200 artillery unit Marines to northern Iraq

Purportedly to protect Americans already there, but under the constraint that the Marine contingent is to avoid taking offensive measures.

As a result, one Marine is already dead. Victim of an ISIS rocket attack:

The U.S. has set up a small Marine artillery outpost in northern Iraq to protect a nearby Iraqi military base . . . .

It is the first such base established by the U.S. since it returned forces to Iraq in 2014 in response to the Islamic State's takeover of Mosul and other areas of northern and western Iraq, Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for the U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad, told reporters at the Pentagon Monday.

He said it should not be considered a combat outpost because it is located behind the front lines and is not initiating combat with the militants.

"Their primary mission is to protect, obviously, Americans," Warren said, referring to the U.S. advisers at an Iraqi base near Makhmour. He declined to reveal the number of U.S. advisers but said it is fewer than 100.

It did not take Islamic State fighters long to notice the additional Marines. On Saturday, they fired two rockets at the site, killing one Marine.

This kind of tactical (not to mention strategic) air-headedness ranks right up there with the commander in chief’s idiotic previous scheme to arm and train allegedly moderate rebels in Syria.

That project turned out a total of only 4 to 5 individual troops. At a cost of about half a billion dollars.

I am not saying a grand strategy is always necessary or even marginally productive, but . . .

If you are going to send troops anywhere, you better be doing more than just dribbling their lives uselessly away.

Allegedly these new Marines are there to protect about 100 American advisers near Makhmour. Yet what are the advisers doing that we have not already (grossly) unsuccessfully done before?

And now the President compounds his “advising” inanity by sending a supposedly defensive artillery Marine unit to protect them in their futile endeavor.

Presumably, being under defensive rules of engagement, the artillery Marines are going to have to stay in one place — or alternatively — drive themselves around to new defensive positions in response to the enemy’s own initiatives. Which leads one to wonder whether the advisers are also moving themselves around in a purportedly equally defensive, allegedly non-combat mission.

What kind of nonsensical, no initiative battle plan is this?

Virtually everything President Obama has done during his tenure has been a 1 percent measure aimed at keeping up political appearances, while frittering other people’s existences away for foolishly optimistic, non-strategic reasons. The net result of his non-stop meddling has been to increase anti-American hostility in the regions we deploy to, but without making any tactical, much less strategic gains.

If the President is correct in thinking that some kinds of tumult cannot be controlled (and I think he is), why does he continue to add fuel to foreign fires with inadequate and unwisely restricted military deployments?

Obama’s record contains blemishes that time alone will not wash away. It is gratifying to know that the president appreciates that Libya has become a “shit show,” thanks in considerable part to an ill-advised exercise in regime change in which his administration was complicit.

Obama vowed to win the Afghanistan War. He will depart office with fulfillment of that promise nowhere in sight.

He vowed to end the Iraq War responsibly. . . . But that conflict has now resumed and the U.S. is back in it.

He has normalized assassination by drone and other means, with implications impossible to forecast.

As for Syria, let’s just say that his administration has not covered itself with glory.

Not to mention the President’s intentionally created chaos in Libya and his Administration’s overt support of terror-spreading Saudi Arabia’s ongoing rape of Yemen.

The moral? — When it comes to the use of deadly force and American troops, a competent commander in chief should have a plan whose probability of success outweighs the likelihood of sustaining useless losses

I support the idea that the United States cannot control the world. But I become irate when we pretend to believe in the limits to power — as the President says he does — and then, in spite of that announcement, we kill, maim and destroy in purpose-lacking, inadequately trooped forays into the very chaos that we previously created by being similarly witless.

Is this cowardice, war profiteering, or just incorrigible stupidity?

PeteFree.com

You Don’t always Need a Strategy — but Sometimes You Do — President Obama’s Violent Vacuity in the Middle East