This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/16/us-war-isis-iraq-hagel-dempsey-congress-combat

The article has changed 2 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 0 Version 1
Pentagon: US ground troops may join Iraqis in combat against Isis Pentagon: US ground troops may join Iraqis in combat against Isis
(about 2 hours later)
The US defense secretary told senators on Tuesday that America is “at war” with the Islamic State (Isis), while the senior US military officer suggested US ground troops might directly join Iraqis in combat. The Pentagon leadership suggested to a Senate panel on Tuesday that US ground troops may directly join Iraqi forces in combat against the Islamic State (Isis), despite US president Barack Obama’s repeated public assurances against US ground combat in the latest Middle Eastern war.
Stripping away an earlier reluctance by the Obama administration to declare its airstrikes against Isis a full-blown war, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel said Isis will “directly threaten our homeland and our allies” unless the US confronts the jihadist army militarily. A day after US warplanes expanded the war south-west of Baghdad, Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate armed services committee that he could see himself recommending the use of some US military forces now in Iraq to embed within Iraqi and Kurdish units to take territory away from Isis.
“This will not be an easy or brief effort,” Hagel said, who defined victory as “when we complete the mission of degrading, destroying and defeating” Isis. “If we reach the point where I believe our advisers should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific [Isis] targets, I will recommend that to the president,” Dempsey said, preferring the term “close combat advising”.
A day after US warplanes expanded the war south-west of Baghdad, Hagel and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended Barack Obama’s newest war before the Senate armed services committee, many of whose members have wanted Obama to take the US into war in Syria even before the rise of Isis. It was the most thorough public acknowledgement yet from Pentagon leaders that the roughly 1,600 US troops Obama has deployed to Iraq since June may in fact be used in a ground combat role, something Obama has directly ruled out, most recently in a televised speech last week.
On Wednesday, Hagel said, General Lloyd Austin, the commanding officer of US Central Command, will brief Obama on upcoming “targeted actions against [Isis] safe havens in Syria”, the clearest signal yet of an imminent expansion of an air war Hagel said would “not be restrained by a border in name only”. On the targeting list is Isis “command and control, logistics capabilities, and infrastructure”. Dempsey, who has for years warned about the “unintended consequences” of Americanizing the Syrian civil war that gave rise to Isis, said he envisioned “close combat advising” for operations on the order of taking Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, away from Isis.
Dempsey, who has long been reluctant to re-introduce US forces into Middle Eastern wars, signaled that some of the 1,600 US military “advisers” Obama deployed to Iraq since June may directly fight Isis, despite Obama’s frequent public assurances that US ground troops will not engage in combat. He also opened the door to using US “advisers” to call in air strikes from the ground, something Dempsey said they have thus far not done but which the US Central Command leader, General Lloyd Austin, initially thought would be necessary when pushing Isis away from the Mosul Dam last month.
“If we reach the point where I believe our advisors should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific [Isis] targets, I will recommend that to the president,” Dempsey said, preferring the term “close combat advising”. “He shares my view that there will be circumstances when we think that’ll be necessary, but we haven’t encountered one yet,” said Dempsey, himself a veteran of the last Iraq war.
Dempsey said the air war in Iraq and Syria “won’t look like a shock and awe campaign”, but will instead be “persistent and sustainable”. He envisaged no end for it, but said Isis’ ultimate defeat will be a “generational” effort during which “moderate” Muslims abandon its ideology – raising questions about what the US military’s actual endpoint will be in pursuing the goal of “degrading and ultimately defeating” Isis, Obama’s stated goal. Obama’s prohibition on ground forces in a combat role was less ironclad than the president has publicly stated, Dempsey suggested.
Hagel stopped short of saying Isis poses an imminent threat to the US, something intelligence agencies consider unlikely in the near term and a typical, if fungible, threshold for launching a war. Hagel instead called Isis “an immediate threat to American citizens in Iraq”, many of whom Obama has sent there in response to Isis, “and our interests in the Middle East”, with the prospect of domestic attacks against the US left as a hypothetical. “At this point, his stated policy is we will not have US ground forces in direct combat,” Dempsey said, to include spotting for US air strikes. “But he has told me as well to come back to him on a case-by-case basis.”
It contrasted with Hagel’s 21 August statement at the Pentagon that Isis poses “an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else”. Hawkish senator James Inhofe, the top Republican on the panel, praised Hagel’s “honesty” in the August assessment. Asked by Inhofe, Hagel nevertheless said he agreed with his earlier statement. Joined by Defense secretary Chuck Hagel, Dempsey said the latest US war in Iraq, and soon in Syria, will last several years and will not resemble the “shock and awe” aerial bombardment that characterized the opening phase of the 2003 US invasion.
Hagel and Dempsey’s testimony came as the House of Representatives prepares to vote, as early as Wednesday, on an amendment to a must-pass funding bill that would give the Pentagon authorities, but not money, to train and arm Syrian opposition members, providing what the administration hopes will be a non-American ground force capable of taking territory away from Isis. Isis’s ultimate defeat will be a “generational” effort, Dempsey said, during which “moderate” Muslims abandon its ideology – raising questions about what the US military’s actual endpoint will be in pursuing the goal of “degrading and ultimately defeating” Isis, Obama’s stated goal.
Hagel pledged to “monitor them closely to ensure that weapons do not fall into the hands of radical members of the opposition”, Isis, dictator Bashar Assad’s regime or “other extremist groups”. The most trusted and effective opposition forces will receive “increasingly sophisticated types of assistance”, which Hagel did not define. Dempsey and Hagel, who described the US as being “at war” with Isis, were more thorough to the committee about US strategy in Iraq than against Isis in Syria, where Dempsey said “two-thirds” of its estimated 31,000 fighters currently are.
He acknowledged “there will always be risk in a program like this” – Isis has already captured weapons believed to be provided by the US to Syrian opposition figures – but argued the threat from Isis justified the risk. In Iraq, the US intends to build upon the 162 air strikes it has launched since August 8, in support of Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces’ efforts to take Iraqi territory away from Isis and “restore the border” with Syria, Dempsey said.
Isis is estimated to have as many as 31,500 fighters as combat, while the Pentagon estimates that 5,000 Syrian rebels could be trained in the first year of the training program. In Syria, the US is seeking to train “vetted” Syrian rebels to capture Syrian territory from Isis. Hagel and Dempsey acknowledged that an initial cohort of 5,000 Syrian opposition forces would not be ready until eight months at the earliest. The House of Representatives plans to attach authorization for the training mission to a must-pass stopgap funding bill with a vote on Wednesday – which will represent the most robust congressional debate thus far on a new Iraq-Syria war.
“Five thousand is not going to be able to turn the tide, we recognize that,” Hagel said. “Five thousand is not going to be able to turn the tide, we recognize that,” Hagel said. Neither he nor Dempsey ruled out requesting additional authorities and funding for building a Syrian proxy army in the future.
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican and the most senior hawk in the Senate, said the administration’s strategy suffered from a “fundamental fallacy”: presuming the Syrian opposition the US wants to train will prioritize fighting Isis instead of fighting Assad, their primary enemy. Dempsey said he hopes enlist unnamed Sunni Arab nations with “very considerable” special operations forces to sustain the Syrian rebel army on the ground, possibly a reference to Qatar. He and Hagel demurred when asked by Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and Congress’s most prominent hawk, if the US’s new allies would receive American air cover if attacked by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
McCain pressed Hagel to clarify whether the US will target Assad air forces should they attack the Syrian rebels under American charge. Hagel declined to give that assurance, saying, “We’re not there yet, but our focus is on Isil,” another name for Isis. “We’re not there yet, but our focus is on Isil,” another name for Isis, Hagel said.
Dempsey – whose resignation McCain has called for, owing to the general’s reluctance to use the US military against Assad – conceded that “if we were to take [fighting] Assad off the table, we’d have a much more difficult time” persuading Syrians to join the coalition, but said the administration nevertheless has an “Isil-first strategy”. Dempsey – whose resignation McCain has called for, owing to the general’s reluctance to use the US military against Assad –conceded that “if we were to take [fighting] Assad off the table, we’d have a much more difficult time” persuading Syrians to join the coalition, but said the administration nevertheless has an “Isil-first strategy”.
McCain said relying on the Syrian opposition to prioritize fighting Isis ahead of Assad, their primary foe, pointed to a “fundamental fallacy” in the Obama administration’s strategy.
On Wednesday, Obama will meet with Austin in Tampa, where Central Command is headquartered. Hagel said the general will brief Obama on upcoming “targeted actions against [Isis] safe havens in Syria”, the clearest signal yet of an imminent expansion of air strikes into Syria. On the targeting list, Hagel said, are Isis “command and control, logistics capabilities, and infrastructure”.
Dempsey said introducing US ground forces into Syria in support of its proxy rebel army would not yield lasting gains, part of his argument that defeating Isis – the administration’s stated ultimate goal – will only result from a “generational” decision by regional Sunni Arabs to reject its ideology.
“I don’t think that even if we were to go in on the ground, armored divisions with flags unfurled, I don’t think we would do anything more than push this problem further to the right,” Dempsey told Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.
“If we don’t get the kind of coalition I’m describing, then we’re into a very narrow CT framework, in my view,” Dempsey said, referencing frequent but intermittent drone strikes against counterterrorism targets the US has launched in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Some senators of both parties expressed discomfort with Obama’s willingness to involve the US in a new war ahead of explicit congressional authorization. Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican, and Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, both said Congress should not end its pre-election session this month without a war vote. Manchin was one of relatively few senators on the panel who appeared inclined to vote against the latest US war in the Middle East.