14 November 2014

Backing Into Yet Another Losing War

November 11, 2014 -

A day after leading his party into an election debacle that was at least partially enabled by his strategic ineptitude in foreign affairs, President Obama trumpeted his success in getting American troops out of Iraq; two days later, he announced that he was sending 1500 more troops into Iraq. American strategy is beginning to more resemble ALICE IN WONDERLAND than ON WAR.

From 1961 to 1965, when Lyndon Johnson finally committed American forces to full scale combat in Vietnam, the United States backed into war by incrementally sending troops to Vietnam in a manner that neither seriously impacted the conflict nor impressed the North Vietnamese. After that, Johnson pursued an equally ineffective bombing campaign in North Vietnam that did even less to impress our adversaries. The result was a loss of confidence in America abroad and at home. Many of my Baby Boom contemporaries refused to participate in an open-ended conflict that had no hope of a reasonable outcome. Johnson wanted the United States to dip its feet in the water in waging war; what he got was a quagmire.

In 1972, I wrote an article for the Marine Corps Gazette advocating a massive raid into North Vietnam that would destroy its military capability to provide a threat to South Vietnam for at least a decade. I believed that if we did not do this, our strategy of merely bombing the North into submission would result in a conventional invasion of South Vietnam. Like most articles by Second Lieutenants, it didn’t influence policy. Three years later, the South fell to the North in a conventional North Vietnamese invasion led by tanks. In fairness to the Nixon administration, it feared that an incursion into the North would lead to Chinese intervention. No such threat exists regarding the Islamic State; it has no protectors willing to take on the United States.

If we go into the areas of Iraq and Syria controlled by the Islamic State with massive force with the vowed limited intent of destroying its conventional military force, and leaving the residue to local forces to deal with, we can accomplish the end state of eliminating the immediate threat in the region and the well- funded existential threat to the United States. That will not solve the problem of how to govern the areas of Iraq that the Islamic State has overrun or the issues raised by the Syrian Civil War; those are problems the Syrians and Iraqis have to grapple with. We can help, but not with the sword of the Islamic State and other jihadist groups hanging over the region.

President Obama enabled the Islamic State’s forays into Iraq by the failure to keep engaged and continuing to help build both an effective government and a competent military capability. We can resume that project with a small but effective advisory presence, but not until the conventional military capability of the Islamic state is dismantled. Only we can do that.

We know how to advise client states in providing good governance and in creating effective militaries. However, we cannot do that unless we stay engaged. We left Iraq half done in 2011, and we never worked hard enough to create a Syrian alternative to Assad that was viable and militarily effective.

Obama’s incremental approach will not achieve success. Backing into a war never works. Obama’s new, slightly enhanced mission will produce body bags but not results.

Like Lyndon Johnson, our current President will find himself in a quagmire that he will continue to deny exists. He won’t fool the American people, our enemies, or our allies. Our prestige as a great power will continue to decay.


As we again commit the sin of amateur incremental engagement in a war against an enemy against a deadly and committed enemy, we face again the very real possibility of being humiliated by an opponent that we can beat if we take a serious approach to warfighting. President Obama has asked the Congress to authorize over five billion dollars to fund his latest strategic fiasco. Our lawmakers should give him a resounding NO! I’m not recommending defunding the war the way the lamentable 1974 Democratic Congressional class refused funding to South Vietnam; I am advising the Congress to force the President to wage real war.

The next Congress would be well advised to refuse to fund any more Mid East adventures until the President can lay out a coherent strategy with an obtainable end state. The President needs to hear things that he doesn’t want to hear. He currently has too many “yes” men and women on his national security team. If President Obama wants to hear only thinks that he likes, he should buy a good record collection.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who has been a civilian advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University's Elliott School of international Affairs.

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