The old FITD technique applied to getting our war on:
President Obama’s top military adviser said Tuesday that he would recommend deploying United States forces in ground operations against Islamic extremists in Iraq if airstrikes proved insufficient, opening the door to a riskier, more expansive American combat role than the president has publicly outlined.
Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that while he was confident that an American-led coalition would defeat the Islamic State, he would not foreclose the possibility of asking Mr. Obama to send American troops to fight the militants on the ground — something Mr. Obama has ruled out.
“My view at this point is that this coalition is the appropriate way forward. I believe that will prove true,” General Dempsey said. “But if it fails to be true, and if there are threats to the United States, then I, of course, would go back to the president and make a recommendation that may include the use of U.S. military ground forces.”
With the top brass at the Pentagon, there will ALWAYS be a reason for ground troops. Add in a vague current mission description, a populace scared shitless to the point that newspapers in WV are seriously posting stories about an ISIS threat close by, a couple more beheadings, a warmongering media establishment, scared politicians who don’t want to seem weak on national security in an election year, and by golly the next thing you know we’ll be fully deployed in the Middle East again. When the Pentagon was told about air strikes only, what they heard was “let me just put the tip in.”
The only thing holding them back will be President Obama, who no matter what he does will get murdered in the media. If there is so much as ONE American military casualty in the next few months, we’ll be hearing about Obama rejecting his General’s advice for the next thirty years. It will be like Benghazi, Carter giving away the Panama Canal, and Jimmy Carter and Desert One on steroids for the rest of our lifetimes.
Belafon
Under the caveat that history rhymes, there is precedent for a Democratic president saying there will only be air strikes and there have only been air strikes.
Raven
I commented last night that Teddy Roosevelt post-losing to Wilson was just like McCain.
Cervantes
Well, maybe you’ll hear screaming and yelling to that effect but the people do not want to send troops back into combat. I don’t think that has changed.
cleek
in case anyone was wondering, a major re-escalation in Iraq is the thing that will make me stop defending Obama. not that it matters, since he’s not up for election.
fuck this stupid government. and fuck the idea that we’re the world’s police.
OzarkHillbilly
This,
which makes me fear this:
I would like to have faith in Obama and his lame duck status but I just don’t know.
Redshift
I think the president is smart enough to understand the truth of the “no matter what he does” part of that statement. Knowing that the same idiots will second-guess you no matter what you do is a powerful antidote against pressure to do the wrong thing.
Mike in NC
The brass are NEVER satisfied with their existing numbers of bombs, planes, missiles, ships, and troops. Plus there is always an emerging threat just over the horizon to justify more money for said goodies. Generals and admirals are overgrown, spoiled children that way. That’s why we need to provide them with “adult supervision”, as we used to say in the Navy.
WereBear
Once again, the good people of Corn Nubbin, OK or Fleck-on-the-Map, IN (my hometown!) are hysterical about the least likely thing that will ever come to their town. Circuses barely travel anymore and cholera is unlikely with good public health measures, and they are still more likely to need to run to the bathroom at the circus than they are to see ISIS beheading someone on the courthouse lawn.
And yet they love to behave as though that’s a real possibility. What the heck is up with that?
Corner Stone
@cleek: What does “major” mean, in your estimation? 5,000? 10,000? Some number far beyond that?
We’re sending 3,000 ground troops to close with and destroy our enemy Ebola. And ISIS is elebenty times more evil than Ebola ever thought about being!
Punchy
I understand your sentiment, but I do remember reading an article a few months back where the Pentagon was determined to kill a few completely useless projects (IIRC, a certain # of tanks, F-35s, and other relics of WWII-type wars) and Congress was the one that refused to kill them, based on the loss of jobs.
But I agree that in general, war mongers want war mongery stuff.
japa21
Of course, the opening paragraph says Dempsey said something he did not actually say, as shown by the actual quote of what Dempsey said.
Mike R
Hopefully as a country we have learned something about not being too eager to start a fight in the Middle East or any where else for that matter. But the realistic side says no chance. Look at the number of absolute idiots we have sent to Washington. As a defense of this position exhibit A John McCain and LIndsey Graham, Exhibit B. Louie Gohmert. We are so screwed.
OzarkHillbilly
@Corner Stone:
But not nearly as discriminating as ISIS.
Morbo
The fact that the generals’ advice would lead to more casualties will be irrelevant, of course.
JPL
@Corner Stone: I don’t know that.
C.V. Danes
@Corner Stone:
If we don’t get this Ebola crisis under control, it has the potential to kill many thousands, if not millions. Compared to that ISIS is just a fart in the wind.
kindness
I think what is different is the advent of the 24/7 news cycle. Yea I know that happened 30 years ago but it wasn’t till the 90’s that the 24/7 conservative news cycle came to pass. And strangely enough for all their professions of love of America and love of The Constitution they love getting elected even more.
So we get the professional pants pissers like Lindsey Graham who in prior years would only have appeared on the evening news and people would know the guys a loon. Now they act like he’s on to something, not because they think he is. They know he’s over the top cray-cray. They simply see it as a path to election. What can you say? I mean Republicans in the old days weren’t willing to burn down the economy and country to score election gains. Now days? Now they ask how big you want that fire?
Betty Cracker
ISIS with weaponized ebola! Skreeee!
But seriously, folks, a military strategist can’t take ground forces off the table if he’s being honest. Courtesy bombing sounds risk-free, but no military action is without unpredictable consequences, is it? That’s why it shouldn’t be entered into lightly.
I trust President Obama to avoid stupid blunders, generally speaking. But even the wisest and best-intentioned leaders can be enticed down a rabbit hole by a ruthless and determined enemy with nothing to lose.
El Caganer
@Raven: This is all good news for Teddy Roosevelt!
Raven
@Betty Cracker: Stop with the logic, it’s time to jump up and down .
gopher2b
NYC and DC (the residents, not the politicians) shrug their shoulders at the ISIS “threat” but rural America works itself into a froth.
This will never make sense to me.
elmo
My Dad told me something when I was a little girl that I have remembered ever since. He was a career Navy NCO, and he told me that no matter what, American troops would be committed in combat somewhere overseas, on a large scale, at least every twenty to twenty-five years. The reason, he said, was that the Pentagon needed an officer corps with ground combat experience, and they would make very sure to maintain a steady supply.
El Caganer
Why the US and its NATO stooges have to do the heavy lifting still hasn’t been properly answered. The final resolution will have to come from the countries immediately affected. This is reminding me more and more of a horrible parody of The Little Red Hen: everybody wants IS to go away, but when John Kerry makes the rounds asking “Who will help me vaporize jihadis?” the response is ‘”Not I,’ said the rich little sheikh; ‘Not I’, said the military dictator, ‘Not I,’ said the moderate Islamist president” and so on.
FlipYrWhig
@japa21:
Reporters are a bunch of motherfucking idiots who start with the story they want to write and then fit in The Quotes. This has been happening ever since this story began. It’s like that _Dumb and Dumber_ bit about “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”
CONGRATULATIONS!
needs moar war.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
@El Caganer:
I mentioned in that thread that my wife also noted TR=McCain.
I seriously think the guy had a real death wish. He wanted to die in a ‘glorious’ way.
He did succeed in getting 3 of his sons injured, one fatally, during WWI. They said he was very melancholy about it but somehow I think he believed it was a glorious way to go & may have been envious.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
Interesting, FYWP tagged raven’s comment as El Cagners when I replied & now will not let me edit it either.
Aardvark Cheeselog
I heard the ISIS guys have penises. Big, scary, black penises that they’re planning to use on our soil.
schrodinger's cat
@Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]: John McCain is doing a TR impression, McCain is a copycat, when he ran against Bush in 2000 he was calling himself a TR Republican. Plus, McCain is no progressive.
ruemara
I’ll worry when President Obama puts forward a plan to put troops onna ground.
Corner Stone
@Aardvark Cheeselog:
Is that how terror babies are grown?
Cacti
Just in case any of your panicked acquaintances need some perspective…
2 Americans have been killed by ISIS in 2014.
20 Americans have been killed by lightning strikes during the same period.
Their status as an existential threat is just a bit inflated by the saber rattlers.
catclub
I think pointed questions asking how much taxes should be raised on high income earners, to pay for the war ( and PTSD treatment and other VA care) will be useful in tamping down the war fever.
catclub
@Cacti: also for perspective: More people die of measles in 72 hours than have died from ebola in 30 years. Get your children vaccinated.
Corner Stone
@catclub:
Why are you trying to politicize our national defense? Is it because you hate our troops? Hand in your fucking freedom badge right now!
El Caganer
@Corner Stone: Are they organic? I don’t want any of that GMO shit.
Corner Stone
@El Caganer: To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. I’m still wondering a little how the big scary pen!s is going to impregnate our soil.
What if they use them to inseminate our soil with ebola babies?! Or maybe babies with built in immunity to ebola, so that when Ebola comes to kill us all they will be the only ones left standing?
Fucking. Diabolical.
Raven
BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s new prime minister said Wednesday that foreign ground troops are neither necessary nor wanted in his country’s fight against the Islamic State group, flatly rejecting the idea a day after the top U.S. general recommended that American forces may be needed if current efforts to combat the extremists fail.
agorabum
Geez, relax. There were three huge caveats on that statement. If the air support doesn’t work, and if he feels isis presents a threat to the us (like Intel on training for Western attacks) then he could see himself recommending ground troops.
And the JCS possibly making a recommendation doesn’t make it so. Just ask gen. Shinseki.
Mike in NC
@Raven: But our troops would be welcomed (back) with flowers and candy!
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@JPL:
They’re being deployed to build clinics.
Never assume that Corner Stone is commenting in good faith. He isn’t.
ETA
The CoJCoS would never rule out recommending ground troops, nor should he. That would make him unqualified for the position he holds.
In before people who don’t fucking understand the military.
Mnemosyne
@japa21:
Yep, it’s pretty hard to get “Obama is sending in ground troops!” from this mass of hypotheticals:
Basically, it sounds like someone asked him a “what if?” question, he answered the “what if,” and the story is trying to present it as “this is totally the plan.”
tam1MI
I commented last night that Teddy Roosevelt post-losing to Wilson was just like McCain.
And look what happened to Wilson.
Frankensteinbeck
This article is a perfect example of why I’m skeptical of every news story until I’ve examined the facts it’s based on. Newsmen know they can sell ‘The government is EEEVIIIIIL!’ stories to both Right and Left, depending on the topic.
@schrodinger’s cat:
McCain is no TR, period, although I did hear that McCain was a prisoner of war.
@C.V. Danes:
Ebola spreads through direct contact with infected fluids. It’s only a crisis now because it’s in an area where the culture is very literally hands-on when someone is sick and dying. While that is extremely sad, it’s never going to be more than a drop in the bucket compared to malaria or, as @catclub points out, even supposedly controlled diseases like measles.
elmo
@Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]:
Be fair. General Ted Roosevelt was a true hero on D-Day, and he didn’t die of combat wounds – he died of a heart attack. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on D-Day.
I think it was Omar Bradley who, when asked what was the most heroic thing he had ever seen, responded immediately: Ted Roosevelt on Utah Beach.
That’s not “Teddy getting his sons killed.”
ETA: And I went back and looked at your comment, and you specified WWI. So my response was at best tangential, and at worst tendentious. So nemmine.
El Caganer
@Frankensteinbeck: McCain was a POW? I did not know this.
And how many planes did TR crash, anyway?
srv
Outside of the Fox fluffersphere, the media has been fluffing Obama.
A weaker willed person than me would start questioning their support of our President under this media storm.
Cervantes
@GHayduke (formerly lojasmo):
What statement do you think was made in bad faith?
Frankensteinbeck
@elmo:
Not sure what you’re talking about, unless it’s snark I don’t get. TR was long dead by WWII. In WWI he formed a military force to go to France, but Wilson refused to send him.
One thing TR wasn’t is a chickenhawk.
Mnemosyne
@elmo:
That was Teddy Jr. As a brigadier general, he was the highest-ranking soldier to invade at Omaha Beach.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Pakistan will take up that offer
Of course wrong war of terror and no reporters were harmed. One thing that does strike me about these terrorist is they seemed to be as enraged over Obama’s withdraw of the ground troops at the Chicken Hawks are. War is and ends of itself in bothside’s minds.
Cervantes
@El Caganer:
None, but did you know he was the first (former) president to fly in one (a Wright bi-plane, in 1910)? He was also the first to go down for a dive in a submarine (the USS Plunger, in 1905), to win a Nobel Prize (Peace, in 1906), and to invite an African-American to share a meal with him at the White House (Booker T. Washington, in 1901).
It was an interesting decade to be alive in.
Cervantes
@Frankensteinbeck:
Right, he barely survived WWI.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: No. He was the highest ranking American officer to land with the first assault wave. MG Norman Cota, for example, landed with the second assault wave – about an hour after the first wave.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@srv: Apparently you have reading comprehension troubles SRV if you think that article was supporting Obama. But I am curious, do you have a position on anything beyond “everyone else is WRONG!!!!”.?
gopher2b
@elmo:
That and they need to test out the new weapons.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]: The defining moments in Teddy Roosvelt’s life were him overcoming asthma by sheer strength of will and the death of his first wife, first child and mother all on the same day. Oddly it left him with the feeling that life is very short and he better get moving.
srv
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: If it weren’t for weak willed Dems like you and those quoted in the article, any objective person would see it as pro Obama. Of course, you can’t be objective:
Attack all you want, the American people and I stand with our President. Enjoy your cuddle with Rand.
elmo
@Mnemosyne: That’s why I said Ted ,not Teddy. Sorry to be unclear.
But he was on Utah, not Omaha, I think.
gene108
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
From your link.
What does not get reported is that despite the ME being the spiritual home of Islam (and Christianity and Judaism for that matter), the vast majority of Muslims are in Asia.
Between India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan you something like 600 to 700 million Muslims.
That being said, there are also 800 million Hindus in South Asia, several tens of millions of Christians and tens of millions of other religions, like Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs.
If al Qaeda wants to start an Islam-against-the-rest-of-South-Asia conflict, the rest of South Asia has the numbers to turn the conflict into a blood bath, the likes of which the world has never seen with corpses piling up on both the Muslim and non-Muslim sides.
For the sake of Muslims everywhere else, somebody needs to stop these al Qaeda fools before they take things too far and someone, somewhere decides they are at war with Islam (a mindset a lot of people, around the world are moving towards).
Edit:
Also from the link.
As much as we focus on the Saudi’s for funding terrorism, there’s a whole bunch of terrorist sympathizers and bank rollers in Pakistan and is as much of a problem as other U.S. allies, with regards to saying one thing and doing another wrt to terrorism.
catclub
@srv: Is this the same article as was at the top of the post?
It does not look like it. It has confused Enhanced Voting, and now me.
ETA: It was this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-17/obama-channels-lincoln-in-campaign-against-islamic-state.html
not the NYT article at the top of this post.
D58826
Most issues in public policy have some sharp clearly defined options at the left and right edge and a lot of mush grey options in the middle. ISIL is different. It is a black hole no matter what direction you look at it. We have jumped way paste swamp and quagmire in one mighty leap.
When you have national leaders like Butters practically crying on TV from fear, no wonder the rest of the country is in a panic. I wonder what PM Butters would have done during the Battle of Britain. He probably would have moved 10 Downing Street to the Canadian Rockies and gave all his speech’s from under his bed.
WereBear
TR lived in a different era… and he was still instrumental in the conservation movement, encouraged early forensic science during his stint as police commissioner in NYC, tried to keep the Republicans from becoming what they are today, and encouraged the nation to appreciate the natural world, even if he did shoot at a lot of it.
And don’t forget this was a man who got shot and went on to do the speech anyway, before he went to the hospital. That takes some brass ‘nads and the echoes of those clanks are still with us today. He might not be your cup of tea, but over a hundred years ago, he was waaaay ahead of his time.
D58826
@Mnemosyne: Yes he was on Utah Beach on D-day. He believed in leading his division from the front. He had a heart attack and died a few weeks later in France.
Botsplainer
@Cervantes:
Unfortunate name.
Whenever I watch Boardwalk Empire, I muse about technological change, and wonder which generation experienced the most across their lifetimes. I’d argue that the generation that came of age in that first decade of the 20th (born around 1890) did – they went from horses,steam engines, telegraphs, gas lights and crude telephony to atomic bombs, rudimentary computers, televisions, ubiquitous worldwide telephones and jets by the time they died. A great many got to live into the era of manned spaceflight and the lunar landings.
Basically, my great-grandparents’ generation.
D58826
@Botsplainer: My grandfather was in that generation. He was born in 1890. He was dumbstruck the first time we took him to a mall.
D58826
Over on Huffington, former Sec. of DEF Bob Gates from a speech yesterday
Mr. Gates in 2011
Of course none of the countries want to have these American boots on THEIR ground.
I wouldn’t blame Obama if he mailed the key to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave to the sage of Wasilla with a note saying a simple person to handle this ‘simple’ problem.
Cervantes
@Botsplainer:
Now, yes, but in those days the word was commonly used to describe divers.
Yes, it’s certainly arguable.
You might want to add penicillin and heart transplants to your list. I’ll stop there.
Bobby Thomson
@C.V. Danes:
ISIS is a fart in the wind, but the risk of Ebola is overstated by the usual gang of idiots. It kills too quickly to cause a true pandemic, and it isn’t airborne.
Bobby Thomson
@Cacti: Also, too.
People are terrible at risk assessment.
D58826
@C.V. Danes: At the moment Ebola is hard to spread because it is not very infectious. It isn’t the flu. You have to come in contact with the bodily fluids of the victim. As long as he doesn’t touch anyone, an Ebola patient could walk down 5th Ave. and not infect any one. People dealing with Ebola patients need the hazmat suits to avoid contact with the blood, stool, etc of the patient.
BUT as long as the disease continues to spread there is a certain chance, maybe small but not 0, that it can mutate into a more easily transmissible form while still retaining its lethality. There is a bird flu variant floating around east Asia with a high mortality rate among the humans who have contacted it but it to is hard to transmit. If that changes than a major pandemic is likely. In fact given the way the flu virus does mutate I would be more concerned about a bird flu pandemic than an Ebola pandemic.
Elie
@Bobby Thomson:
It can be transmitted via droplet nuclei and that accounts for some of the mysterious transmissions. Droplet nuclei can transmit virus up to 10 ft.
As for the quick kill off — the virus lives for a time on surfaces and in body fluids and waste from dead and dying. As you have more people lying around all over the place the more transmission can happen
Elie
@Elie:
Droplet nuclei
Zandar
@Cervantes:
All of them.
grillo
@D58826: My grandfather was born in the 1890s and died in the 1980s. The change he witnessed was unimaginable. But he shrugged at it in an entirely indifferent manner and told stories about how much easier it was to change a tire when you could lift up one corner of the car with your hands and shove a rock under it.
That is change.