Michael R. Gordon at the New York Times writes:
In a major shift of strategy in Iraq, the Obama administration is planning to establish a new military base in Anbar Province and send hundreds of additional American military trainers to help Iraqi forces retake the city of Ramadi and repel the Islamic State.
This follows a recent admission by the president that the administration did not yet have a complete strategy for dealing with ISIS. The establishment of the new base could be considered curious since it was reported yesterday that an existing base in Anbar, established for the training of Iraqi soldiers by U.S. personnel, had seen no recruits for weeks.
The sending of some 400 trainers is not sufficient in the eyes of some administration critics who want to see:
… American spotters on the battlefield to call in airstrikes [and] the use of select American Special Operations forces or Apache helicopter gunships to help Iraqi troops retake Ramadi.
Still, the move is a departure and a decisive one with Anbar:
… now expected to become the focus of a long campaign that will seek to regain Mosul at a later stage, probably not until 2016.
