Good Morning Viet Nam! Sorry, I mean Syria.

Well we’ve gone from 50 special ops troops in Syria to a reportedly 200 more this week. I was afraid that the Paris terrorist attacks might become President Obama’s Bay of Tonkin…but he didn’t go quite that far…yet. But his response is more special ops forces in Iraq/Syria:

President Obama’s policy on sending troops into Syria has always been a defiant “no.”

Until now.

In a statement on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that the United States would be deploying a second round of Special Operations troops to Iraq to conduct raids, free hostages, and capture Islamic State leaders. The size of the force remains unannounced, but according to Carter it will be larger than the group in Syria. The US team will be working with the Iraqi government and security forces, as well as Kurdish peshmerga forces says the Pentagon chief.

The Iraqi operation will be conducted unilaterally with the Syria operation and seems to be part of a larger, more aggressive strategy from the US to take down the Islamic State.

This whole thing smells incredibly bad. ISIS could probably be defeated if all of the western powers already engaged in Syria would work together instead of at odds with each other.

Two previous posts on US troops in Syria: Obama Finds His Own Private Viet Nam Obama Can’t Ramp Up The War in Syria Fast Enough!

Share:

Related Articles

1 thought on “Good Morning Viet Nam! Sorry, I mean Syria.

  1. In not so many words the President has said the truth: the culture there is so backwards taking out ISIS alone will not stop this. When a significant number of people find ‘honor killings,’ religious law that includes corporal punishment and death, and revenge (which is always evil period in my view) as not only acceptable but aspects of some twisted concept of morality a simple-sounding solution would be like cutting the head off the hydra.

    Of course nothing being done would be a mistake. We are losing an entire generation in that part of the world to extreme Islamic fundamentalism. They want not only all non-Muslims dead, but also any Muslims that do not follow them. If they are allowed to fester and hold territory long enough that they effectively really are a nation, in a few decades they will make the Nazis look kind. See the Nazis hid much of the extent of thier brutality because many Germans would have been horrified and it would stir more international support against them. In contrast this Islamic State is proud of the torture, enslavement, and genocide it commits. That may sound to be in contradiction with my earlier backwards culture comment, but there comes a time when sitting back and letting a mortal enemy of human rights and freedom fester and indoctrinate an entire generation is a horrendously bad idea.

    There is no clean solution to this. Actually winning literally would require teaching those people that revenge and religious killings are evil, and that is virtually impossible without many decades of cultural evolution or an iron fisted occupation and propaganda campaign, the latter of which is not realistic. Sitting by is like watching a particularly aggressive weed take over because there will always be other weeds anyway.

    The Islamic State’s goal is global genocide, and it is proud of it. It cannot be ignored.

Comments are closed.