Obama Case Against Ground War: Too Many U.S. Deaths by Peter Baker and Gardiner Harris, New York Times
President Obama, seeking to counter pressure for a military escalation in response to terrorist attacks, told a group of news columnists this week that sending significant ground forces back to the Middle East could conceivably result in the deaths of 100 American soldiers every month.
In a private session at the White House, Mr. Obama explained that his refusal to redeploy large numbers of troops to the region was rooted in the grim assumption that the casualties and costs would rival the worst of the Iraq war. In such a scenario, he said, a renewed commitment could take up to $10 billion a month and leave as many as 500 troops wounded every month in addition to those killed, a toll he deemed not commensurate to the threat.
Mr. Obama said that if he did send troops to Syria, as some Republicans have urged, he feared a slippery slope that would eventually require similar deployments to other terrorist strongholds like Libya and Yemen, effectively putting him in charge of governing much of the region. He told the columnists that he envisioned sending significant ground forces to the Middle East only in the case of a catastrophic terrorist attack that disrupted the normal functioning of the United States…
Comments
Option 1:
We can take the enemy's bait, play by the enemies rules and fall into the trap (over-commitment) that the enemy has, so obviously, set for us. And be forced, thereby, (sooner rather than later) to:
a. Go home with our tail between our legs and
b. Accomplish nothing.
Or:
Option 2:
We can play by our own rules (limited commitment) -- and force the enemy to play by these rules also -- this, providing that:
a. We never have to "go home"/never have to leave the theater/the field-of-battle and, thus,
b. Are able to "wage war" (political or otherwise) indefinitely.
Thus, Option 2 providing that we are able to defeat the enemies' strategy of "political attrition."
A strategy that is specifically designed to cause the U.S./the West today, via over-commitment, to be forced to leave the Middle East entirely to our enemies.
This, much as a similar "political attrition" strategy, employed by our enemies back-in-the-day, successfully caused both France and the United States (via over-commitment) to be forced to leave -- entirely to our enemies -- the theater/the field-of-battle known as "French Indochina?"