At a news conference Monday after the close of the summit meeting, Mr. Obama acknowledged a need to accelerate the training of Iraqi military forces to counter the advance of Islamic State militants, and he said that he had asked the Pentagon for a plan to do that.
“We don’t have, yet, a complete strategy, because it requires commitments on the part of Iraqis as well,” Mr. Obama said. “The details are not worked out.”
Mr. Obama said of the militants of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS: “They’re nimble and they’re aggressive and they’re opportunistic.”
He acknowledged that the training of Iraqi forces “has not been happening as fast as it needs to.” And he said the United States has “made some progress, but not enough” in stemming the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria.
Mr. Obama said that “thousands” of new fighters were replenishing the ranks of the Islamic State faster than the coalition could remove them from the fight.
“If we can cut off some of that foreign fighter flow, then we are able to isolate and wear out ISIL forces that are already there,” Mr. Obama said. “Because we are taking a lot of them off the battlefield, but if they’re being replenished, then it doesn’t solve the problem over the long term.”
The president also said that Turkey was not doing what was required to monitor its border with Syria and halt the stream of fighters.
Earlier on Monday, Mr. Obama met with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq, where he reaffirmed the world powers’ commitment to supporting Iraq in the fight against the Islamic State, which has made major gains in recent weeks.
“Although it is going to take time, and there will be setbacks and lessons learned, we are going to be successful,” Mr. Obama said at the start of his meeting with Mr. Abadi. “ISIL is going to be driven out of Iraq, and ultimately, it is going to be defeated.”This represents an about-face by the U.S. president. From the outset, ISIS has been defined by USG/Western media as an indigenous, Anbar-based response to the predatory overreach of Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki.
The Cracker Jacks version of the story goes something like this: Because al-Maliki refused to pay the Sunni Sons of Iraq, as was promised, Al Qaeda in Iraq rose from its ashes in Anbar, using the war next door in Syria as a proving ground, and reconstituted itself as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The United States spread this story last year as a way to successfully force out al-Maliki as prime minister. Now the story changes. It is really the flow of foreign fighters via the border with Turkey that makes Islamic State so lethal and not because it is an Anbar-based popular guerrilla movement.
This puts Obama more in line with the fact-based reporting of, say, a Patrick Cockburn writing for The Independent whose interviews with Sunnis who have fled Anbar establish convincingly that ISIS is foreign-led, i.e., Chechens, Saudis, Libyans, et al.
I haven't seen anything in the mainstream press drawing attention to this latest Obama somersault, though there has been a reaction to Obama's statement that "We don't have, yet, a complete strategy . . . ." For instance, Shreeya Sinha in "Obama’s Evolution on ISIS" has a helpful compendium of Obama's twists and turns, beginning with "ISIS is a J.V. squad of takfiris," or something along those lines, to the latest on June 8, "We don't have a complete strategy."
All the evasions, false starts and missteps can be attributed to the fact that Obama has to obscure the obvious -- ISIS is a creation of U.S. allies Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, the same allies the U.S. has been working with to funnel fighters into Syria. In the war against ISIS, the United States is battling an enemy that it worked to create. Naturally this kind of disingenuousness -- saying you are fighting the takfiris while aiding the takfiris -- is going to result in policy confusion.
The plan floated this morning (Michael Gordon, "U.S. Embracing a New Approach on Battling ISIS in Iraq") is that the U.S. is going to occupy Al Taqqadum, a base outside the Anbar town of Habbaniya, and use it as a training hub for the recapture of Ramadi:
To assemble a force to retake Ramadi, the number of Iraqi tribal fighters in Anbar who are trained and equipped is expected to increase to as many as 10,000 from about 5,500.
More than 3,000 new Iraqi soldiers are to be recruited to fill the ranks of the Seventh Iraqi Army division in Anbar and the Eighth Iraqi Army division, which is in Habbaniyah, where the Iraqi military operations center for the province is also based.
But to the frustration of critics like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who say that the United States is losing the initiative to the Islamic State, the Obama administration has yet to approve the use of American spotters on the battlefield to call in airstrikes in and around Ramadi. Nor has it approved the use of Apache helicopter gunships to help Iraqi troops retake the city.It was the U.S.-trained Iraqi Army that disintegrated in Mosul last year at this time. One wonders how this training mission will be any different. And where is any mention of the Shiite militias currently in Anbar, the Popular Mobilization Committees?
My sense is that this is all part of the U.S. shadow dance. The U.S. is putatively at war with ISIS, but it is really at war with its Sunni allies, who are at war with Iran; at the same time, the U.S. is also at war with Iran. Everything is topsy-turvy. To keep Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait and Qatar from ratcheting up support for the takfiri fighters, the U.S. must re-station troops in the region.
That's what we're looking at here. The GCC wants the U.S. military footprint back on the ground. Absent that, more war.
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