A Quote by Carl Levin
It's unclear how air strikes on our part can succeed unless the Iraqi army is willing to fight, and that's uncertain given the fact that several Iraqi army divisions have melted away.
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The U.S. spent billions of dollars to build a secular, professional national Iraqi army but failed because, despite all the U.S.-supplied guns, tanks and planes, the Iraqi military fell apart when challenged by a band of terrorists.
When Saddam Hussein was eliminated, the Iraqi statehood and thousands of people from the former Baath party were also eliminated. Thousands of Iraqi servicemen, who were part of the state's Sunni elite, found themselves thrown out into the street. No one gave a thought about them, and today they end up in the ISIS army.
It's easy to say, let's go in and get the bad guys. But you have a divided country of Sunnis and Shias. The United States goes and takes action there on behalf of the Iraqi government. You've got Iran coming in and saying we're going to stand with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, so now we're aligning ourselves with Iran, and if we do air strikes, becoming de facto air force for them.
As a 22-year Army Veteran who served in Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, and as a Civilian Advisor to the Afghan Army in Operation Enduring Freedom, I understand both the gravity of giving the order, and the challenge of carrying it out.
Using overwhelming air power to utterly and completely destroy ISIS. To put things in perspective, in the first Persian Gulf War, we launched roughly 1,100 air attacks a day. We carpet bombed them for 36 days, saturation bombing, after which our troops went in and in a day and a half mopped up what was left of the Iraqi army.
I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army. In the air and on the oceans we could maintain our place, but there was no force in the world which could have been called into being, except after several more years, that would have been able to maul and break the German army unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter and manhandling that has fallen to it through the strength of the Russian Soviet Armies.
The air strikes are important [to fight ISIS], but we need to have an air force capable of it. And because of the budget cuts we are facing in this country, we are going to be left with the oldest and the smallest Air Force we have ever had. We have to reverse those cuts, in addition to the cuts to our Navy and in addition to the cuts to our Army, as well.
Some Iraqi troops aren't willing to fight for their government. But many Shiites appear willing to fight for their religious leaders.
After about midday my dad sent cars from his private collection for us. We were told to get in. We had almost lost contact with my father and brothers because things had got out of hand. I saw with my own eyes the [Iraqi] army withdrawing and the terrified faces of the Iraqi soldiers who, unfortunately, were running away and looking around them. Missiles were falling on my left and my right - they were not more than fifty or one hundred metres away. We moved in small cars. I had a gun between my feet just in case.
With no other security forces on hand, U.S. military was left to confront, almost alone, an Iraqi insurgency and a crime rate that grew worse throughout the year, waged in part by soldiers of the disbanded army and in part by criminals who were released from prison.
The administration needs to speak honestly with the American people. Exaggerating our progress in defeating the insurgency or in creating an Iraqi army paints a dangerous picture.
Americans would have a right to go to war with the Iraqis if we could name one author from Iraq. It disturbs me that we're going to war with somebody we know absolutely nothing about. Name one Iraqi poet, one Iraqi woman activist, one Iraqi singer. Name one Iraqi novelist. You can't. And how can you go kill someone you don't know anything about?
ISIS is a formidable foe, but the counter forces to it have only just begun and if these forces, the Iraqi army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, American air power, the Syrian Free Army, work in a coordinated fashion, it will start losing ground. Also, please keep in mind that ISIS does not actually hold as much ground as the many maps flashed on television keep showing. Large parts of those territories that ISIS supposedly controls are vacant desert.
Yes, we need a force to continue to train, assist, advise the Iraqi army.
Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.
Many of our soldiers are stationed at Camp Coyote just south of the Iraqi border. This is how you know we have a strong army, when you can actually tell your enemy exactly where your camp is and what its name is.
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