What’s the easiest way to get American soldiers to Iraq?
Lie to the American people.
That’s what happened the last time American soldiers were sent to fight in a war in Iraq. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney wanted a war, so they told the American people that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It was a bald faced lie, and it worked.
What about this time around?
Well, this time around, the American people are being led to believe that now that “we are at war with” the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war), American soldiers won’t be sent back to Iraq. The idea has been that there will be no “boots on the ground”.
Republican U.S. Representative Matt Salmon recently blasted the dishonesty of this assertion. “Why don’t we be straight with the American people? There are already boots on the ground. You might not want to call it boots on the ground. But, the people that are there, the over 1,000 that are already there right now, their families consider them to be boots on the ground,” he said.
Exposing the lie even further, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress yesterday that American soldiers in ground combat against soldiers of the Islamic State could easily become part of the new U.S. War. Dempsey explained to members of Congress that he “would go back to the president and make a recommendation that may include the use of ground forces,” if he believed it to be the best military strategy.
This statement from Dempsey has been depicted as a reversal of policy from the Obama Administration, but is it? When Barack Obama gave a speech announcing that the United States is now at war against the Islamic State, he said that “the best way to defeat a group like ISIL isn’t by sending large numbers of American combat forces to wage a ground war”. That statement makes it sound as if Obama is ruling out sending American soldiers into ground combat in Iraq and Syria, but that’s not precisely what it says. Obama’s words only argue against “large numbers” of American soldiers fighting on the ground, and they only state that a massive American ground army in the Middle East isn’t the best strategy, rather than promising that such an army won’t end up going to Iraq.
In fact, in Obama’s speech, he admitted that he has already approved sending more American soldiers to be on the ground in Iraq. Obama described their mission in a limited way, that they “will help Iraqi and Kurdish forces with the training, intelligence and equipment they need to take the fight to these terrorists on the ground”, but never in his speech did he promise that American soldiers wouldn’t join in fights on the ground.
This wasn’t an accident. Speeches by the President of the United States are reviewed word by word to make sure that the President says exactly what he intends to say – nothing more, and nothing less. It seems that Barack Obama’s strategy is to triangulate, appearing to Americans to be proposing only a bombing campaign while allowing himself room for another American ground invasion.
It’s telling, and troubling, that Obama chose to end a speech titled We Will Degrade and Destroy ISIL with the observation that the new war in Iraq is starting “thirteen years after our country was attacked”, as if there is a connection between Iraq, the Islamic State and the attacks of September 11, 2001. We went through this kind of misdirection with the last Iraq war as well. There is no connection between the Islamic State and the attacks of September 11, 2001. The Islamic State didn’t even exist in 2001.
Barack Obama, the politician who won the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination instead of Hillary Clinton because he had opposed war in Iraq and promised to end it, is now bringing the United States into an entirely new war in Iraq, and doing it in a style that George W. Bush would have approved of. Democrats ought to be outraged that their own political party’s leader is engaged in these kinds of slippery maneuvers, but so far, voices of Democratic dissent are few and far between.