2015-12-21 Home Front: WoT
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Chuck Hagel's Astonishing Admission on Syria
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Follow-up on posts earlier in the week. | [THEATLANTIC] Last week, former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave his first extended interview since resigning as Pentagon chief in November 2014. The curated interview with Foreign Policy is worth reading in its entirety, if for nothing else than the insights into how White House officials and staffers micromanaged Department of Defense decisions; Hagel claims that staffers would call generals "asking fifth-level questions that the White House should not be involved in." (This would not be the first or last White House charged with this degree of oversight.)
However,
we can't all be heroes. Somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by...
the most revealing moment of the interview was not an instance of White House micromanagement, but rather indecisiveness. In September 2014, in reaction to the horrific videos of U.S. citizen beheadings released by the self-declared Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
, Congress passed legislation mandating that the Pentagon "provide assistance, including training, equipment, supplies, and sustainment, to appropriately vetted elements of the Syrian opposition." The most critical question regarding this policy decision was not whether the program would be effective--almost immediately nobody inside or outside of the Pentagon thought it would be--but what direct military support the United States would provide to the Pentagon-trained rebels in Syria. As I later wrote, initial, limited support to Syrian rebels could escalate to a Bay of Pigs situation, where the U.S.-backed rebels were easily killed or captured, and subsequently U.S. credibility further eroded.
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Posted by Fred 2015-12-21 00:00||
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File under: Govt of Syria
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Posted by Besoeker 2015-12-21 06:19||
2015-12-21 06:19||
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Posted by Procopius2k 2015-12-21 07:30||
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Posted by JohnQC 2015-12-21 08:41||
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Posted by Procopius2k 2015-12-21 08:43||
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Posted by Sven the pelter 2015-12-21 09:15||
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Posted by Abu Uluque 2015-12-21 12:14||
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Posted by Crusader 2015-12-21 12:41||
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Posted by Abu Uluque 2015-12-21 14:55||
2015-12-21 14:55||
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Posted by Rex Mundi 2015-12-21 15:09||
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Posted by Abu Uluque 2015-12-21 17:52||
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Posted by Silentbrick 2015-12-21 20:27||
2015-12-21 20:27||
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