Yep, we need 10,000 to 20,000 more "necessary enablers" from a group created by the Bush administrations along with all that de-Baathification, awakening, and kleptocratic incompetence.
Iraq hawks began to argue for re-Americanizing the war against the Islamic State on Thursday in response to nearly a week of audacious territorial gains in Iraq and Syria.
Key architects of the 2007-8 troop surge called Obama’s strategy in the nine-month-old war no longer viable now that Isis has seized Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. They stopped just short of urging the one step most allergic to the American president: returning US combat troops to the battlefield where nearly 4,500 of them died during the 2003-2011 occupation.
Calling Isis an “unfathomable evil” during a Thursday morning Senate hearing, Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute urged “a total of 15 to 20,000 US troops in Iraq in order to provide the necessary enablers, advisers and so forth. Anything less than that is simply unserious.”
(Kagan in 2007) The enemy has been at war with us for nearly four years. The United States has emphasized restraint and caution. It is time for America to go to war and win. And America can.
Jack Keane, the former army vice-chief of staff and mentor to General David Petraeus, excoriated the Obama administration for a “fundamentally flawed” strategy that effectively cedes Syria to Isis. He said it was time to begin “serious planning” for the reintroduction of US combat brigades, something Obama has consistently ruled out since he began the anti-Isis war last summer...
Keane said the US needed to get over its “political psychosis on Iraq” and escalate the war. He faulted Obama for downplaying the rising fortunes of Isis out of a desire to avoid a deeper American commitment, considering administration pronouncements reminiscent of the unrealities of the Rumsfeld Pentagon – a critique that is gaining purchase within defense observers on either side of the Isis debate.
There is “a disturbing and frightening echo of the summer of 2006,” Keane said, when “these officials looked at you and defended that strategy and told you that overall the strategy was succeeding.”
According to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, they now control half of the country and thousands of more civilians are fleeing alongside Bashar al-Assad's retreating army.
Palmyra known as both the "bride" and the "pearl" of the desert is a remarkable 2,000-year-old historic oasis and UNESCO world heritage site. The Temple of Bel and its surrounding line of sun kissed columns and a hilltop castle were a tourist's dream and far less busy than Jordan's more famous Petra. It is a global icon that is now under the sovereignty of a group who are trying to bring about their own "Year Zero" to the region.
Destroying history is part of reimagining it under their own auspices and every site and monument that is destroyed or sold, is another victory.
The loss of Palmyra is both strategic and symbolic. The Institute for the Study of War described the loss of Palmyra as a "major defeat for the Assad regime that is likely to jeopardise the regime's ability to maintain a foothold in Deir ez-Zour". The road to Homs lies ahead and a number of military facilities as well as the surrounding gas fields of al-Hail and Arak are now in ISIL's hands.
ISIL will feast on the sales of antiquities that couldn't be removed in time and we await the seemingly inevitable destruction of the parts of the site that can't be plundered and sold. From the museums of Mosul to the Assyrian city of Nimrud, the ISIL sledgehammers have turned hundreds of years of human history into dust in a matter of hours.