He won’t name the enemy. He won’t allow his intelligence services to study its ideology. His Pentagon releases falsified maps that obscure the enemy’s gains. The enemy captures a city that has been called the key to controlling all of Iraq (Ramadi) and an renowned archaeological treasure (Palmyra in Syria) in a single week, and he insists we are not losing.
Fastasy-based analysis from the President: “Obama: We’re definitely not ‘losing’ in Iraq – ISIS storming into Ramadi was just a ‘setback’ and it would be a mistake to send in U.S. ground troops,” by Francesca Chambers, Dailymail.com, May 21, 2015:
President Barack Obama echoed the many claims of his administration officials in an interview released today and said that the fall of Ramadi is a mere ‘setback.’
‘No, I don’t think we’re losing,’ the president told The Atlantic in the Tuesday interview. ‘There’s no doubt there was a tactical setback,’ he said, but ‘Ramadi had been vulnerable for a very long time.’
The president dug in his heels and said he would not send in U.S. ground troops to defend the war-torn country. Last time the U.S. came to the rescue, the Iraqi government ‘squandered’ the country’s new found freedom, he said, by refusing to reach out to to different sects of the population.
‘If the Iraqis themselves are not willing or capable to arrive at the political accommodations necessary to govern, if they are not willing to fight for the security of their country, we cannot do that for them,’ Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.
The president’s comments to Goldberg, made on Tuesday, underscore the executive branch’s position that retaining control of Ramadi isn’t mission critical, even though it is situated less than two hours west of the country’s population center, Baghdad.
While they would prefer that it had not fallen to ISIS over the weekend, the failure to protect it, to them, doesn’t indicate that the president’s ‘overall’ strategy in the region needs revision.
The White House again said this afternoon that a deployment of 10,000 to 15,000 ground troops, as some Republicans, including GOP presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, have suggested is not an option that’s currently on the table.
Iraq veteran and Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger told his colleagues yesterday that in order to defeat the terrorist group, ‘we need to use the number of troops and the amount of military force necessary…and not just necessary to follow the President’s promise of “no troops on the ground.” ‘
‘I don’t think we need another 200,000 troops in Iraq, and I haven’t heard a single person actually ever suggest that, but we need to use what is necessary to push this back.’…