- Thu Nov 13, 2014 9:03 pm
#49557
U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey testify before the House Armed Services Committee that he recommends considering deploying combat ground troops to Iraq ahead of a reported offensive in early 2015 designed to take back key portions of the country captured by the Islamic State group.The election results gave Dempsey some balls and I'm betting he's about ready retire anyway rather than continuing to be Obama's tool to dismantle the military.
“We left Iraq and we left it with things undone,” said Dempsey, referring to the 2011 withdrawal, during which the U.S. didn't secure a status-of-forces agreement that would have allowed a residual U.S. military presence beyond the American Embassy in Baghdad. “We hadn’t fully established a logistics architecture, an intelligence architecture; they did not have close air support and the ability to integrate fires.”
“We left there with a Ministry of Defense that was largely dysfunctional in the way it would assign leadership,” Dempsey said. (Indeed, al-Maliki himself performed the role of defense minister throughout his tenure.) “They knew that. They knew we knew that, it was not a completed work.” "The current state of security affairs is about what it will be for another generation." Dempsey said of the region.
