US strategy in Iraq and Syria depends on Iraqis and Syrians

Yesterday, at the G7 meeting in Germany, President Obama said this about the effort to counter ISIS in Iraq:

Obama said that the 3,000 US service personnel in Iraq sometimes find themselves with “more training capacity than we’ve got recruits”. “We want to get more Iraqi security forces trained, fresh, well-equipped and focused and Abbadi wants the same thing so we’re reviewing a range of plans for how we might do that,” Obama said. “We don’t have, yet, a complete strategy, because it requires commitments on the part of Iraqis as well about how recruitment takes place, how that training takes place.”

There’s nothing particularly new or unusual here. The US has military advisers in Iraq to train up regular Iraqi military forces to take on ISIS, so they can stop relying so heavily on Iran-backed militia fighters to carry the brunt of the fighting. The Iraqi government is, however, a dysfunctional mess, and that’s hindering the ability of any US effort to be successful. Seems about right to me. So I wonder how it’s being totally misinterpreted:

Critics of the administration’s strategy in Iraq seized upon the President’s comments Monday, claiming they indicated a policy failure and referencing similar comments Obama made in August.

“What has President Obama been doing for the last 10 months?” the Republican National Committee wrote Monday. House Speaker John Boehner took the attack another step, responding to Obama with a tweet of a popular emoticon of a person shrugging (“¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “) as a shorter summary of Obama’s strategy.

Of course, in August Obama was talking about not having a strategy to counter ISIS in Syria, which, hey, we still don’t really have one of those, because the two most viable forces opposing ISIS in Syria belong to Bashar al-Assad and Al-Qaeda, and we don’t really want to work with either of them for obvious reasons. In Iraq, Obama wasn’t saying that there’s no strategy, he was saying that the strategy isn’t “complete,” because Baghdad can’t pull itself together.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Arizona, hammered Obama on the Senate floor Monday, saying the lack of a strategy is alarming “while ISIS goes from house to house in Ramadi with lists of names and they execute people and they kill 3-year-old children, and they burn their bodies in the streets and the atrocities in Syria continue as Bashar Assad barrel bombs innocent men, women and children.”

“One can wonder, one has to wonder, whether this President just wants to wait out the next year and a half and basically do nothing to stop this genocide, bloodletting, horrible things that are happening throughout the Middle East,” McCain said.

One can certainly wonder whatever one wants. One could wonder why John McCain has openly mused about doing war on a dozen or so countries over the years, and whether he’s just a fan of war for war’s sake when all is said and done.

But with the counter-ISIS strategy the administration has chosen, there won’t be a real plan in place to defeat ISIS in Syria or in Iraq until there’s a capable ground force in either of those countries that a) can be trained and equipped by the US and b) won’t later make the US seriously regret giving it that training and equipment. I mean, you can say that the strategy sucks, but there is a strategy. Politico even labeled Obama’s comments a “gaffe” in Politico’s special, unbiased, straight-news way, but where’s the actual gaffe?

And really, unless America is hatching a plan to invade (re-invade) and then annex Syria and Iraq, the only way this fight ends permanently is if it ends at the hands of Iraqi and Syrian armies fighting on behalf of broadly popular governments in Baghdad and Damascus. Is this really that hard to fathom, or is it that McCain and Boehner and Politico don’t want to fathom it? I think I know the answer.