‘Impossible’: NY Times Doesn’t Believe Obama’s ‘No Troops on Ground’ Promise
The New York Times has lost faith in President Barack Obama‘s pledge to avoid committing ground troop to the ISIS fight in Syria and Iraq.
When Obama gave a speech last week that laid out his plan to combat ISIS, an Islamic terrorist network, he said the U.S. would engage in military airstrikes but would not be utilizing its own ground troops. That policy seemed to reverse on Tuesday, however, when Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey said there could be scenarios where ground troops would be necessary. The White House then tried turning that back around, saying Dempsey was merely addressing a hypothetical.
The Times isn’t buying it, editorializing Wednesday that it’s “impossible” to believe Dempsey wasn’t articulating a real change of course:
There is no way to read this other than as a reversal from the firm commitment Mr. Obama made not to immerse the country in another endless ground war in the Middle East.
Even though General Dempsey’s remarks were conditional, the Obama administration has turned on a dime in record time and opened the door to deeper, more costly American involvement even before the strategy is fully sketched out.It’s impossible to believe that General Dempsey was speaking just for himself, though administration officials said his remarks were not cleared by the White House. His initial comments were contained in written testimony, so they would have gone through a review process, at least by Pentagon officials, and scrubbed in advance for errors and misstatements.
He reinforced his position under questioning by members of the Senate committee. American forces in Iraq “are not participating in direct combat. There is no intention for them to do so,” he said, but “I’ve mentioned, though, that if I found that circumstance evolving, I would, of course, change my recommendation.”
So what changed in the last week?
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