Defense Secretary Ash Carter: We Might Be Going Back to Fight in Combat in Iraq Again (and Syria Too)

Obama fails. It's what he does.

Obama has once again proven the long-known wisdom -- of which he was ignorant, and when it was told to him, he jeered at it, because it conflicted with his "new" thinking -- that the surest way to waste men's lives in pointless warfare is to adopt a craven, cowering position and invite aggression.

All hail the Eternal Failure and Bringer of Destruction, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama.

They are resorting to Orwellian double-speak to not call it combat, because, of course, Obama declared the end of combat action in Iraq, and Obama is a vain and weak man who mistakes himself for a god.

So they're calling it "direct action on the ground."

Like that soldier who died when entering, um, a hostile non-permissive environment. Totally different from "combat."

An American service member was fatally shot during a U.S. Special Forces raid to rescue 70 hostages--some chained to a wall--in an ISIS compound in central Iraq. The death marks the first U.S. combat death since its withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. And it calls into question President Obama’s repeated promises that "American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq again."

Even after the raid, Pentagon officials, who once insisted there were no American boots on the ground, continued to call the U.S. effort a "train, advise and assist" mission, not a combat one. It marked the latest game of military semantics in a war defined as much by its messaging as by its tactical results.

At a briefing with reporters, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said the U.S. military was "not in an active combat mission" in Iraq. Cook repeatedly called the raid "unique" but refused to say whether the U.S. military had conducted similar mission before this one or whether anyone in the Iraqi government had asked for similar help in the past.

Rather he said Secretary of Defense Ash Carter approved putting U.S. troops in harm's way because the Kurdish forces asked for raid and because both Kurdish and U.S. forces believed hostages had recently been killed; more could die within hours, they feared.

...

To be sure, Special Forces are deployed in combat missions in areas officially considered non-combat areas. But until Thursday, the Obama administration had never suggested that those elite troops were exempt [from] how the U.S. defines it mission in Iraq. But White House spokesman Eric Schultz did just that Thursday, saying there are several unique missions in Iraq: "We have also delineated several types of operations that would be permitted under the President’s directive. That includes the train and advise and assist program. That includes Special Operations forces. That includes humanitarian rescues. And that includes counterterrorism missions."

Maybe Sgt. Joshua Wheeler died in a Workplace Violence Event.

posted by Ace at 01:21 PM

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