STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

Beyond Mission Creep: General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Recommends “Modest [U.S.] Force In Iraq!”

The recent article by Helene Cooper, NY Times, 11/13/2014, “Top General Says He’s Open To Using Ground Troops To Take Mosul” reaffirms for me one basic concept of war. We never enter into a war with the complete conviction to win.  Instead Americans become consumed in our own quagmire of wishful thinking and lack of strategy. How many times have we heard the re-affirmation from President Obama that ‘there will not be American boots in Iraq’.

He,  like most of our Presidents has lied repeatedly without consequence. After POTUS has just deployed close to 3000 American troops to Iraq to be ‘military advisors’—whatever that means—we now have a clear statement that there will be a very high probability that there will be American combat soldiers fighting alongside the irrepressible non-existent Iraq Army.

Ostensibly, we are downsizing our fighting forces. In reality, it appears that Americans are fighting everywhere from Africa to the Middle East and on to the Ukraine. Many of these fighting personnel are categorized in the rubric of ‘advisors’.  Yet, having spent only thirty years in the national security apparatus, I am still not clear as to what ‘combat advisor’ is other than an American soldier shooting alongside his designated ‘consultee’. The combatants that our ‘advisors’ have ‘helped’ like the South Vietnamese, Iraquis and other unwilling patrons have all exhibited one major deficit. They don’t really want to win a war or fight for themselves.

Isn’t bizarre that our Presidents, JFK and LBJ, assured our nation that we had ‘no direct involvement’ in Vietnam, after having deployed over one million soldiers in different rotations of ‘advisor’? How is it that these ‘advisors’ then turned into massive casualties in Vietnam consisting of over 50,000 dead and more than 250,000 wounded?
Iraq has developed its own vocabulary of absurdity. We invaded for WMDs that were never there. We fought against Shi’ites and other ethnic groups who killed and maimed our ‘advisors’ at record numbers. Finally we left in order to make certain that we would never return. However, we have not really “returned” to Iraq because we are not there in ‘full combat’ roles but as ‘advisors’.

Now Dempsey not having learned the lessons of Vietnam, nor the previous Iraq/Afghanistan wars, has now committed himself and our country without a declaration of war, to having ‘modest troop’ numbers in Mosul. Déjà vu…. All over again? 

What will the final result of the non-combatants in the so-called ‘non-war of Iraq’ be? More dead Americans. Greater numbers of  “wounded warriors”.

Why do I think that this deployment to Mosul is very dangerous? We are not in a state of war with Iraq, Afghanistan or any other country. ISIS is strictly the result of our incompetent handling of a multi-culture society that we did not really understand. Nor were we, Americans able to effectively work with all the Shi’ites, Sunni, Kurds, Druze – and their shifting hourly alliances, purposefully created in order to confound our so-called ‘best efforts’.  

Dempsey’s inevitable deployment of a ‘modest force’ is the third time that Americans have invaded Iraq without a clear rationale; other than the duplicitous, CIA-contrived-concept of ‘fighting terrorism’ a la George Bush Jr/Cheney.  “Terrorism” is not a strategy.  It is a tactic that is best handled by HUMINT, psychological warfare methods, and “regime change”—rather than kinetic actions/forces.

For some time now,  I have respected both the professionalism and dedication of General Martin Dempsey.  He has brooked the nonsensical, amateurish behavior of the novitiates, like Obama and his White House staff--- Susan Rice; Ben Rhodes; Samantha Powers; John Brennan; Dennis McDonough. 

Yet now in his statement that he is willing to “deploy a modest force to Mosul”, Dempsey enters the pantheon of Army Generals who have gone down in history as unadulterated failures like Gen. Westmoreland [Vietnam] and Gen.Tommy Franks [‘shock and awe’]. Americans have remained too silent at a time when the President, once again, relies on rationales for war that depend on distortions, outright lies and constant deceptions.

Obama did not serve in combat.  Neither did any of the pundits who had sent us into the wars in which we were defeated –LBJ, Reagan, Clinton, Bush jr

Wake up America! And let’s stop this absurd warring! That is the best honor that we can give our Veterans who have served our country. No more unnecessary wars! Remember, it is very easy to send American troops into combat but it is very hard, if almost impossible, to extract them from combat.  

Let us remember that we have not won a war since 1945.  Yet we have been involved in hundreds of undeclared conflicts over the world in the ersatz jingoistic cry of “national security” over the past fifty years.

Let me end this blog by quoting Herodotus, the famous Greek philosopher:
“In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons!”