Peshmerga fighters in Iraq, near Sinjar. AFP.
The United States is deploying at least 200 more special forces troops to fight ISIS in Iraq. AFP. The deployment goes against President Barack Obama's pledge to not to deploy "boots on the ground" in Iraq or Syria, though that pledge was broken long ago. 3500 troops are currently in Iraq in a non-combat role. In October, the president announced the deployment of 50 special forces in Syria. The troops being deployed in Iraq will be special forces who will work with the Kurdish Peshmerga forces. The troops will be able to conduct raids, free hostages, gather intelligence and capture ISIS leaders. They will also be capable of conducting cross border raids in Syria. The US has called on allies to deploy forces as well, but so far, nobody is stepping up to do so.
My Comment:
Mission creep. Our commitment to the wars in Iraq and Syria keeps growing larger. And there hasn't been much in the way of debate in the US media. The government just announces deployments and nobody questions it. I think that there should be some kind of congressional approval for deploying troops, but I seriously doubt that will happen. Obama largely has a free hand in Iraq and Syria, and nobody is really questioning what he can do. Sure people question if what he is doing is the correct thing, but nobody questions if he even has the power to do what he is doing. There used to be a thing called the War Powers Resolution, but it has been consistently ignored for quite some time.
As for the battle against ISIS, will these troops do anything against them? My guess is not much. From the description of what the troops are being tasked to do, I am guessing that these are the elite Delta Force operators. Hostage rescue and capturing high ranking prisoners are pretty much Delta's entire purpose. It could be the Navy Seals as well, or some combination of both forces. This is different then the special forces currently deployed in Syria. Those are most likely Green Berets, whose main job is training local forces. Whoever is getting deployed to Iraq, their job isn't going to be training people. It's going to be combat.
Still, 200 troops can't have a huge impact on the battlefield. Killing ISIS leaders and releasing hostages is all well and good, but they can't destroy large amounts of ISIS troops. They can't take and hold territory from ISIS. And they can't give backbone to the actual fighters in Iraq that are arrayed against ISIS. Even though these troops are the most elite forces we have, they can't win a war by themselves. You need regular troops to do that.
All that being said, these troops will play a role. Rescuing hostages is probably the most important thing they can do. Though forces have deployed in Iraq before, the last hostage rescue attempt did not go well. In that raid, we lost a man, and ended up rescuing the wrong people. We tried to rescue a large group of Peshmerga forces, but we ended up saving a bunch of Saddam Hussein loyalists instead. We lost a man, rescued the wrong people, and the hostages we were after ended up getting killed anyways.
That's not to say that our troops did a bad job, just that they had terrible intelligence. I see further raids going the same way. Our problem against ISIS isn't that we don't have the forces to deploy. Our problem is that we don't have enough intelligence to direct these kinds of attacks. More often then not we hit the wrong targets because ISIS is smart enough to avoid the kinds of things that reveal what they are up to. They don't use phones or the internet all that much, and as far as I know they don't have spies working for us.
Of course, we can and do pull off amazing special forces raids all the time. When he have the correct information, more often then not we succeed. I think these troops will accomplish their mission. It's just that they can't win the war by themselves. 200 troops is enough to cause a little chaos and maybe rescue a few hostages. But they can't do much more then that.
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