The following editorial first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
President Barack Obama’s decision to put 615 more American troops into the Iraq war, announced Wednesday, is curiously at odds with the peace-builder legacy that he would seem to be working on with his trip to Israel to attend the funeral of Israeli peace-seeker and fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres.
The argument for the move, to beef up the fight against the Islamic State, bringing the U.S. troop level in Iraq to 5,180 in the face of Obama’s long-ago campaign pledge to end the Iraq war, is weak. The United States already has underway military involvement not only in the 13-year-plus Iraq conflict, but also in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen with little effect. Why raise the level of exposure of U.S. troops in the region further now?
The second argument for increasing U.S. involvement in the Iraq conflict at this point is to raise prospects of fulfilling the boast of U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter on Sept. 8 that Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, both Islamic State strongholds, would fall to U.S.-led forces “within months.”
That is to say, before the U.S. presidential elections. In other words, the fall of Mosul and Raqqa would add to Obama’s credentials as a forceful military leader before he left office.
There are some strong arguments against increasing U.S. troop involvement in Iraq at this point. The first is that the Iraqi national army, which U.S. forces are supplying and training, continues to show itself relatively toothless on the battlefield — meaning that U.S. forces will play a prominent role in whatever assault on Mosul occurs. Washington has yet to explain coherently why Americans should care one way or the other who holds Mosul, or Raqqa, for that matter. The argument that taking Mosul would validate continued U.S. support of the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and the policy of building it a credible national army has a vaguely “dog-chasing-its-tail” quality to it. If Abadi’s government had the general support of the Iraqi people, they would put in the field a credible national army on their own account, and his government would not need more American troops to fight its battles.
Obama’s decision to increase U.S. forces in Iraq at this point seems wrong, and may become even more costly when an offensive to take Mosul begins.
