Lindsay Graham wants to send 20k troops to Syria
The Washington Post reported last night that Senator Lindsay Graham, one of the four Republican presidential candidates who wants to send troops to Syria and Iraq, says that he’ll send 20,000 troops to the region to prevent ISIS from expanding across the Lavant.
“President Obama has made a mess of the world,” said Graham. “Syria is hell on earth.”
Graham blames Syria’s entire crisis on a) Obama’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces — something the Iraqi government at the time demanded; b) on the Obama administration’s reticence to take aggressive action at an earlier stage in the Syrian conflict.
Of course, the reporter, Ishaan Tharoor, blames Bush. Yeah, well, I blame them all. If Congress got off their fat asses and let US oil companies drill and refine our own fuel here in this country, events in the Middle East wouldn’t affect us quite so much. If the White House would come up with a clear plan for destroying ISIS instead of pinprick attacks, we’d have more control over events in the region. Instead of blaming each other, we need to get to work and do the things that got us involved in the Middle East in the first place instead of cleaving to the politics of it all.
By the way, Graham is toast.
Category: Terror War
Rather than deploy troops, I say we pull everything back and nuke the place from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure!
Corporal Hicks agrees Ripley.
“Syria is hell on earth.” Therefore, let’s send 20,000 of our best there? Tell you what, Grahamsy, you go first and let us know how it goes.
It’s Lindsey Graham. Lets send all those transsexuals they say there are. We can call it The Fabulous Brigade.
Lindsay Graham? FUCK. HIM. Even if our Personnel were sent there, would they be allowed to hit and hurt ISIS or would they have their hands tied via dump truckloads of asinine ROE’s requiring top echelon authorization to even return small arms fire? This and Graham’s previous calls to cut Veterans’ benefits make him as likeable to me as warm beer and old MRE’s!
“Send 20,000 troops”? Are you going to declare WAR, Senator? Are you going to let our troops actually fight a WAR, or you going to send them on another “humanitarian mission,” and then deny their medical claims when they get home, because they weren’t “in a war zone”? Do you even know? Do you even care? Our troops are not fertilizer, Senator — you and your ilk have no business spreading their blood and bodies all over the world in the hopes that something beautiful (or, with your track record, perhaps the term is ‘valuable’) will grow.
Preach the gospel. Actually send the dogs of war, or keep us home and glass the entire damn region.
Nah, dimwit graham just wants to send a bunch more equipment, weapons and vehicles for them to fight us with….!
This guy is an embarrassment. As a native South Carolinian I can’t believe this is the best we could find to send to DC. I having a very difficult time finding anyone to vote for next year.
Well, he does put the SWEET in “Sweet Tea” lol
Deez Nuts is looking better and better.
Would love to see what Graham’s ROE’s would look like. Somehow, I don’t think it would be “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.” Probably closer to “close up the wall with our American dead.”
Sometimes reading about this stuff is like eating an ice cream cone too fast and getting brain freeze:
“A recent survey… found that one of five Syrians surveyed said they consider the Islamic State a positive influence. And 82 percent said they believe the Islamic State was created by the United States and its allies.”
Which means that 80 percent of Syrians don’t consider ISIS to be a positive influence, but are fleeing to U.S. allies in Europe who are responsible for creating ISIS in the first place?
Graham needs to check if his health benefits cover a cranial rectumotomy…
OK, I’ll be the contrarian. The man may well have a point. And I’m also not certain 20k is a large enough force.
I don’t like the idea of sending US forces into that cesspool again. But I’m also not real thrilled with the idea of a fundamentalist Islamic Caliphate ruling Syria, Iraq, and much of the Arabian Peninsula, either – and possessing their resources. The latter is beginning to look like a distinct possibility.
Too bad that no one told the current
group of feckless fools and toothless tools running the show in DCAdministration that a power vacuum always gets filled pronto back in, oh, Sep 2011 – when they were negotiating for a SOFA in Iraq. Or when they started trying to topple Assad “on the cheap” a year or so later.Graham may have a point but it’s one that won’t be acted on until January 2017 regardless of the necessity of an intervention prior to that date.
I suspect that most of the bad actors in the ME also know this and are planning accordingly. I suspect ISIS et al have figured out if they can lock down these areas before Obama leaves office it will make it far more difficult for the next administration to garner any support for a larger US effort or even any US effort at all.
Obama has been checkmated and I don’t see him looking to rout ISIS or any other bad actor in the region. Syria will remain a hell hole (well more than it always was) for at least another 20 months unless Assad gets a knockout blow prior to that. Obama and company lack the willpower to use massive big army force to do anything, thus training 5 guys as force multipliers…really? Nothing happening in DC that will affect the ME at the moment.
I hope to be proven wrong, but I am reluctant to invest large sums in the effort.
Checkmated? Hardly. More like blundered into a Fool’s Mate scenario. Or tried to win big playing 3-Card Monte on a city street.
Everything that happened re: Iraq and ISIS was reasonably foreseeable. And if I remember correctly, the current Administration was indeed warned against leaving a power vacuum in Iraq in 2011. They chose to beat feet anyway.
VOV, the real problem with that dimwitted excuse for existence in the White House is that he has never, in his entire life, ever had to compete in anything, not in the way that you or I would define competition.
I love competing. It gives me an incentive to give my best effort. I want to win. Doesn’t mean I always do, but I do at least try, because I want that blue ribbon.
The clankersore in the White House has never had to do anything like that in his useless, meandering life. He didn’t really win the election either time. He just got lucky, and we get to witness the embarrassment of that asshole in office make a complete fool of himself and the USA.
I think you’re right about the timing. They have a little less than 2.5 years to be destructive. Russia may or may not succeed in what it’s doing, but Russia has those 10 wasted years in Afghanistan, just as we have those 10 years in Vietnam.
There may come a point where Vlad will say “Возможно, пришло время взрыва бомбы в месте.”
P.S. I am not proficient in Russian, so if I screwed that up, my apologies.
We’ve proven that we can do this – we can defeat an insurgency, a civil war AND Islamist fundamentalists, all at the same time. The ONLY thing we lack is sustained support from the political class. ISIS festering in Syria is a choice, not an inevitability.
I’m with you – I want ISIS destroyed (again), and I want it done right. But given the three primary options: (1) go big and long and do it right, (2) stay out entirely, and (3) use half-measures micromanaged from DC – I’ll choose (1) over the others every day, but I have to choose (2) over (3).
It’s not just the political class though, too many of the public turned away from the war just as we were winning because it was ugly and hard and they didn’t want to deal with that. Armies don’t fight wars-nations do, without broad and deep public support for the fight, we might as well not bother.
I agree with everything else you wrote.
Lest we forget, Russia has already sent people in to support Assad. Col (JAG) Graham wants to send in more troops. I’ve said this before, unless you want to commit to 50-80 years of supporting these folks, stay out. MacArthur wasn’t kidding.
“Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
Genghis Khan didn’t get that memo.
Well, I haven’t gone up against a Sicilian when death is involved either.
But then, this is DC. They only care about how it looks for them in the next election.
I think you hit something squarely on the head. The politicos in DC don’t actually BELIEVE in anything, except poll numbers and election returns. But stability and peace and people living without fear of unbridled violence? Nah. Too much effort.
Great, now we want to go to Syria. I must be real behind on the news–do we have a ‘side’ that we’re on over there? Preferable a side that isn’t normally in the ‘death to America’ camp.
Nah, pretty much everyone there is in the Death to America camp.
Faqheem.
Graham’s strategy reminds me of the old tale of a foreign diplomat who went to an American football game, and afterwards commentsd “as a game, it is too much. As a fight, it’s not enough.
Depending on ROE, 20,000 is probably either too much or too little. Too little to fight an actual war, and if hamstrung by the usual silly ROE, would be too many… by about 20,000.
Yap, yap, yap. Graham, you go first. Getcherself a horsey and go.
Okay, this is what you do.
1 – Tell Peshmerga to vacate now and then carpet bomb the entire region using the biggest possible conventional bombs. Include incendiaries in designated places, but essentially bomb the living shit out of that entire pisshole area. That’s the first wave.
2 – Send a message, to wit: Drop your weapons and surrender or we do another bombing run.
3 – If #2 does not happen, see #1.
4 – Round up all able-bodied ME men 15 years and older, load ’em up, unload them in Syria/Iraq with weapons, ammo and C-rats (no, not MREs) and tell them their women and children will rejoin them when they take their own turf back. No jumping jacks, just gunzzz, ammo and C-rats.
5 – Sell Turkey on the idea that a stable Kurdistan is a better neighbor than an unstable Syria/Iraq, and continue to support the Peshmerga.
They’ve been living under despotic tyrants for at least 8,000 years, maybe longer. They will never adopt the kind of government we have because they haven’t got it in them.
EX………I’m in total agreement with your plan! Except the part about C-rats. That falls under cruel and unusual punishment. Smile
Well, they’re used to eating crap, aren’t they?
The Turks will never buy that. Too much of eastern Turkey is ethnically Kurdish for them to willingly allow an independent Kurdistan anywhere in the ME.
Tough bananas, Hondo. That’s the deal.
I can quickly bring up their denial of the Armenian genocide thingy as leverage.
And when you do, the Turks will simply tell you you’re wrong and will continue to deny the Armenian Genocide. As well as the ethnic cleansing of Greek areas of Asia Minor that occurred at roughly the same time.
The Turks look out for, well, the Turks – period. They learned long ago that doing so is the only way to survive in that part of the world.
I know the perfect Commanding Officer-Col Lindsay Graham!!
Will he be placing his Uniform back on and earning that Colonels pay?
why start now?
And only for 9 days at a time
You had me until “earn”. He’s a DC politician, he doesn’t earn his Senator paycheck and you expect him to earn his O-6 paycheck?
It was pretty far fetched at him actually putting his uniform back on for anything more than a photo op.
With the mission last, feelings first Obama military? Good luck with that.