There was a time when the Obama administration was being urged to leave a residual force in Iraq. The presence of U.S. troops would, the argument went, have a stabilizing effect. The force, according to its proponents, would number somewhere around 10,000. This, of course, didn’t happen. The administration went with total withdrawal.
Now, as Gordon Lubold and Paul Sonne of the Wall Street Journal report
The U.S. military is requesting authority to send up to 500 new troops to Iraq ahead of a much-anticipated campaign to take back Mosul from Islamic State, according to U.S. officials, adding to an expanding American presence in the country.
This would
increase the number of American personnel officially deployed to Iraq from 4,400 to about 4,900. The Pentagon also maintains up to 1,500 additional U.S. forces that it doesn’t acknowledge as part of its Iraq force, most at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or on temporary assignments. The new deployment would bring the overall U.S. presence to as high as 6,400. The 500 would be in addition to roughly 400 new personnel the U.S. sent to Iraq in early September to prepare for the Mosul offensive.
The troops are, of course, not in a combat role. Which leads to in an increasingly frustrated American military, as Andrew Tilghman, of Military Times, reports
Most American military personnel are deeply skeptical of the United States’ nation-building missions overseas and would prefer to see leaders in Washington focus the country’s resources on less ambiguous missions like killing terrorists and protecting the homeland, according to a new first-of-its-kind survey.
It can, of course, be exceedingly frustrating, when you are deployed in a non-combat role, to come under attack by mustard gas.
