So President Obama is sending “fewer than 50” special operations troops into Syria. I know he wasn’t even born yet when we sent our first troops to Vietnam, and wasn’t yet a teenager when we finally pulled out. But he must know the facts: more than a half-million Americans on the ground at the peak of the war, almost 60,000 killed, more than 150,000 wounded, many still dysfunctional to this day.
Which raises these questions: What has the president learned from history? And, are we condemned to repeat it?
A common phrase that characterized Vietnam was “mission creep.” First we had a few hundred advisers, then we sent in combat GIs, then we staged air raids, and then, when we still weren’t achieving our goals (which, like Iraq 40 years later, kept changing), the United States abruptly raised its troop levels from 23,000 one year to 185,000 the next and eventually to that peak number of a half-million-plus.
And yet, while it’s still not popular to say it bluntly, we lost anyway.
Today? Obama seems to be ignoring the lessons briefly learned from the treasure we lost: When you’re trying to fix something bad, there are lots of things you can attempt, but precious few you can achieve.
So now what we’re doing is supplementing local soldiers who are fighting the Islamic State (which the White House calls ISIL). The way White House press secretary Josh Earnest put it was, “The responsibility that they have is not to lead the charge to take a hill, but rather to offer advice and assistance to those local forces about the best way they can organize their efforts to take the fight to ISIL or to take the hill inside of Syria.”
The problem is, it’s not just the Islamic State fighting for each hill. It’s the Islamic Front. And the al-Nusra Front. By one estimate, there are about a thousand rebel groups in Syria, all battling for a piece of the action. Including, for good measure, al-Qaeda.
Which means there will be a lot of hills to take. A lot of hills to defend. And if history is any guide, a lot of hills that fall back into enemy hands.
Earnest also said, “These forces do not have a combat mission.” What that means is, they don’t … until they do.
Look at more recent history. In Iraq, the Islamic State overran the American-trained-and-funded Iraqi army to capture major cities like Fallujah and Ramadi. In Afghanistan, the Taliban overran the American-trained-and-funded Afghan army to capture the provincial capital of Kunduz.
There’s simply no denying that what we’ve done in both those countries hasn’t worked. Some will disagree with that conclusion, but I base it on something I’ve seen in each of the eight wars I’ve covered: Passion trumps everything else. It doesn’t have to be passion for anything we believe in as Americans, it just has to be passion to fight, passion to triumph, passion to die.
Somehow, the jihadist fighters from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda and the Taliban and others have shown an intensity of passion that the poorly paid soldiers of our allies haven’t shown. That helps explain why they haven’t won.
I’m not a dove. I’m a hawk if 1) the cause is just, and 2) the gains are likely to mightily outweigh the losses. Well, you can put a check mark next to the former; the cause is just. But the latter? With mission creep like this, history is not on our side.
Which comes full circle to the question: Why are we now about to do something else that probably won’t work?
What Obama doesn’t seem to see is, for a variety of reasons, allied armies tend to lose the war if we don’t fight it for them. So, if we’re not all in, we ought to be all out.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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