Obama confident US troop surge in Iraq will put coalition on offensive

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/09/obama-troops-iraq-coalition-isis

Version 0 of 1.

The latest US troop surge in Iraq will allow an offensive campaign against Islamic militants, Barack Obama claimed on Sunday, as political talk shows featuring the president and his predecessor, George W Bush, underscored the growing echoes of the past in current American military strategy.

In his first public comments since doubling the number of US ground troops in Iraq to 3,000, Obama said the decision did not represent a failure of his administration’s early reliance on air strikes in Iraq and Syria. He said the deployment, announced on Friday night, “signals a new phase” in his campaign against the Islamic State – known as Isis or Isil.

“Rather than just try to halt Isil’s momentum, we are now in a position to start going on some offensive,” he told CBS.

“The air strikes have been very effective in degrading Isil’s abilities and slowing the advances they were making. Now we need some ground troops, Iraqi ground troops, to start pushing them back.”

The White House insists the new US troops will focus on training Iraqis to fight Isis and co-ordinating air strikes, rather than becoming involved in what it calls an active combat role.

“What hasn’t changed is our troops are not engaged in combat, essentially what we are doing is we are taking four training centres with coalition members that allow us to bring in Iraqi troops, some of the Sunni tribes that are still resisting Isil, giving them proper training, proper equipment, helping them with strategy, helping them with logistics,” said Obama.

“We will provide them with close air support once they are prepared to start going on the offensive against Isil, but what we won’t be doing is having our own troops do the fighting,” he added.

However, the president also refused to rule out further increases in military engagement in Iraq and Syria. Daily bombing raids on Isis are carried out in both countries, by a US-led coalition.

“As the commander in chief, I am never going to say never,” he said, when asked if more troops would be sent. “But what the commanders who presented the plan to me say is that we may actually see fewer troops over time because now we are seeing coalition members starting to partner with us on the training and assist effort.”

Obama insisted that this Iraqi campaign would be different from past campaigns by the US in the middle-eastern country.

“What we learned from previous engagement in Iraq is that our military is always the best, we can always knock out any threat, but then when we leave that threat comes back,” he said.

The new strategy has echoes of previous US attempts to train Iraqi forces. The former president George W Bush also appeared on CBS on Sunday to defend his original decision to invade Iraq, denying it was just to “finish the job my father started”.

“I went in there as a result of a very changed environment because of September 11 and the danger we were concerned about was that the weapons would be put into hands of terrorist groups that were going to come and [make] the attacks of 9-11 pale in comparison,” he said.