BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL AID TABLE
TODAY COMPARISONS WERE MADE OF KING JOHN TO FADED CELEBRITY BARRY O.
THE COMPARISON DID NOT GO OVER WELL AT THE WHITE HOUSE.
STOMPING HIS FEET, BARRY O INSISTED HE WAS NOT A KING! "I AM YOUNG AND PRETTY AND A PRINCESS! I AM PRINCESS BARRY!"
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Last week, Barack Obama made some remarks that continue to haunt him. One person sounding off? Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Martin Matishak (The Hill) speaks with Gates:
“Just adding another few hundred troops doing more of the same I think is not likely to make much of a difference,” he said.
“We have to figure out what our strategy is. We should have had a strategy a year ago that took into account differences within the Iraqi government and the sectarian difference in the country and so on,” Gates added.
Gates is far from the only one concerned with Barack's more of the same passed off as 'strategy' or a 'plan.' The editorial board of the Baltimore Sun weighs in:
The chances that a few hundred more American advisers can turn the situation around are remote unless Iraqi leaders can get their act together and unify the country against ISIS. Until that happens, sending more U.S. troops only serves as window dressing for a continued U.S. withdrawal from the region.
After years of U.S. effort and billions of dollars spent training and equipping the Iraqi security forces, only to see them suffer a humiliating setback when Islamic State fighters captured the city of Ramadi last month, it's clear the U.S. strategy isn't working. Airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition haven't stopped ISIS advances on the ground, and U.S. commanders openly admit that plans to retake the major Iraqi city of Mosul, which fell to the insurgents last summer, are now on hold indefinitely. There's no telling how long the current military stalemate will last, but ISIS clearly has the advantage.
[. . .]
We are first to admit that there is no easy solution here, but the American public is being ill served by any suggestion that what Mr. Obama is doing will make the slightest difference. Sending a few hundred troops merely gives the impression that he is taking action while really just kicking the can down the road for the next American president to contend with.
Exactly.
At Reuters, Peter Van Buren shares his take which includes:
This is likely only the beginning of Obama’s surge. General Martin Dempsey, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outlined the establishment of what he called “lily pads” — American base-lets scattered around the country. Of course, like Taqaddum, these lily pads will require hundreds more American military advisers to serve as flies, at risk of being snapped up by an Islamic State frog. Any attack on U.S. troops would require a response, a cycle that could draw the U.S. deeper into open conflict.
The new strategy also revises the role of American troops in Iraq. “Advise and assist” is the new “training.” While careful to say Americans would not engage in combat per se, signals suggest advice and assistance will be dispensed quite close to the front.
In sum: More troops, more bases, more forward-leaning roles, all operating at times against the will of a host government the United States appears to have lost patience with. The bright light of victory is years down a long tunnel.
We’ve seen this before. It was Vietnam.
Some details are different. The jumps from air power to trainers to advisors to combat troops took years in the Vietnam War. Obama has reached the advisor stage in just months. The Iranians fighting in Iraq do share a short-term goal with the United States in pushing back Islamic State, but like the Russians and Chinese in Vietnam, ultimately have an agenda in conflict with American policy.
Meanwhile, similarities scream. As in Vietnam, a series of U.S.-midwifed governments in Baghdad have failed to follow Washington’s orders; they have proceeded independently amid incompetence and corruption. Both wars are characterized as good versus evil (baby killers in Vietnam, jihadis chopping off heads with swords in Iraq); both were sold under questionable pretenses (humanitarian intervention in Iraq, reaction to an alleged but doubtful attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964) and as part of a great global struggle (against communism, against Islamic extremism). Despite the stakes claimed, few allies, if any, join in. In each war, the titular national army — trained, advised and retrained at great cost — would not fight for its country. The host country is charged with ultimate responsibility for resolving its (American-created) problems, even as America assumes a greater role.
And on the ground in Iraq, the dying continues. Margaret Griffis (Antiwar.com) counts 275 violent deaths across Iraq today. 275 dead doesn't have the bright spin Brett McGurk likes to offer -- maybe the reason that the administration avoids talking about the dead unless it's the dead killed by US war planes dropping bombs from overhead -- at which point, it's talk of dead 'terrorists' while repeatedly ignoring that all the dead are not terrorists and that these bombs have killed a large number of civilians.
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