Sending Attack Helicopters to Iraq and Special Ops Troops to Syria?

© 2015 Peter Free

 

28 October 2015

 

 

Militaristic America seems unable to get out of its own strategic way

 

From Reuters:

 

 

The United States is considering sending a small number of special operations forces to Syria and attack helicopters to Iraq as it weighs options to build momentum in the battle against Islamic State, U.S. officials said on Tuesday.

 

Two U.S. officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing deliberations, said any deployments would be narrowly tailored, seeking to advance specific, limited military objectives in both Iraq and Syria.

 

That option includes temporarily deploying some U.S. special operations forces inside of Syria to advise moderate Syrian opposition fighters for the first time and, potentially, to help call in U.S. air strikes, one official said.

 

Other possibilities including sending a small number of Apache attack helicopters, and U.S. forces to operate them, to Iraq, as well as taking steps to bolster other Iraqi capabilities needed to claw back territory from Islamic State.

 

© 2015 Phil Stewart and Jeff Mason, U.S. weighs special forces in Syria, helicopters in Iraq, Reuters (28 October 2015)

 

 

Let me understand this . . .

 

We are going to provide American special operations troops to support “moderate” Syrians:

 

 

(a)  whom we have already admitted do not actually exist in numbers high enough to have a measureable effect on anything achievable —

 

(b) to purportedly advance our four-year unsuccessful effort to

 

(c) make Syria completely collapse into unmanageably violent chaos

 

(d) by championing the idea of getting rid of President Bashar al-Assad,

 

despite

 

(e) the very recent and currently somewhat effective efforts on the part of the Russian Federation to keep him flying.

 

In other words, we are now contemplating upping the potential East versus West nuke-to-nuke ante.

 

 

Not content with that rather large bit of arguable stupidity

 

We are also considering giving the Iraq military some American attack helicopters, knowing that:

 

 

(a) Iraq will use our helicopter pilots and crews just as ineptly as it has used everything else that we have “donated” or assisted them with

 

and that

 

(b) this is the same Iraqi military that already turned over at least a billion dollars-worth of American military equipment and weapons to ISIS.

 

 

The moral? — President Obama’s domestic political acumen is getting the better of his common sense strategic judgment

 

Apparently hoping to fend off Republican “war is good” critics of Democratic Party defense policies — and undoubtedly with an eye toward Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign — the President is content to continue the George W. Bush jack-assery that turned the Middle East into a Hell on Earth.

 

American troops and Iraqi innocents are likely to be killed (or maimed) in furthering these hare-brained schemes. Yet more blood expended in pursuit of nonsensical plans.