Iraq Vet Blasts Obama’s Blurry ‘Boots on Ground’ Rhetoric

President Barack Obama gave a

speech at the United Nations earlier today to explain America’s
war against the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS) in Iraq and Syria. CNN

reports that “Obama reiterated … that U.S. boots on the ground
will not be part of this fight,” something the president has been

adamant about in the days leading up to airstrikes. It’s a
claim that is completely bogus, charges Officer Clay Hanna, who
served in Iraq from 2003 to 2008.

He
writes for Politico:

I was once a pair of “boots on the ground,” so I know a little
about what the phrase means. And I can tell you that, listening to
the back-and-forth between the White House and the Pentagon over
who exactly we’re sending to Iraq (and now possibly Syria), neither
side is giving the American people the whole story. First of all,
you know those boots on the ground everybody’s still discussing
whether we should deploy? Well, they’re already there. We are
already effectively engaged in combat in Iraq, in direct
contradiction of what President Obama said when he announced he was
taking action against the Islamic State terrorists, telling the
American people in an address from the White House that the mission
“will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”
He said pretty much the same when he told troops at MacDill Air
Force Base: “The American forces do not and will not have a combat
mission.”

The other part of the Obama
administration’s strategy, to fund other rebel forces to fight
ISIS, isn’t a great idea either. Hanna claims, “The very same
militias, still sworn enemies of the United States—the very men who
tried to ambush and kill my men—will now be propped up by our
training, weapons and leadership to heroically save their nation
from an enemy they created. All in the interest of avoiding placing
American ‘boots on the ground.'”

Hanna points out that some 1,700 American military personnel are
already in Iraq, and that to say that those “advisers, logistics
managers and other troops” are not at war “on the ground” is a
deceptive distinction without difference.

The same could be said of Secretary of State John Kerry’s

insistence that this potentially
multi-year,
multi-billion dollar campaign is a “very significant
counterterrorism operation,” but not a “war.”

Notably, Obama’s speech today also featured increasingly
aggressive rhetoric against the Islamic State. It’s so similar to
the rhetoric Bush used during the Iraq War that Hanna participated
in, it’s
virtually indistinguishable: Bush said, “We face a brand of
evil, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time in the
world,” and Obama says, “There can be no reasoning, no
negotiation with this brand of evil.”