The death of a U.S. Navy SEAL in Iraq–Charles Keating IV–has exposed an interesting rift between the Department of Defense and the White House about what U.S. forces are doing there in the first place. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said forthrightly: “It is a combat death, of course. And a sad loss.” White House spokesman Josh Earnest, on the other hand, denied that Keating died in combat: “The relatively small number of U.S. service members that are involved in these operations are not in combat but are in a dangerous place,” he said.
Carter needs to be commended for honesty, while Earnest needs to be censured for being less than, well, fully earnest. Keating was apparently working with Kurdish peshmerga forces not far from Mosul when a flying column of ISIS fighters penetrated Kurdish lines and killed him along with others in an intense firefight. U.S. forces then responded with intense air strikes that were said to have killed more than 20 militants. How is this not combat? And how does Keating’s presence near the front lines not represent “boots on the ground”?
Only in the imagination of President Obama and his close aides can the U.S. mission in Iraq be said not to be a war. This kind of rhetorical legerdemain is not exactly new–recall that Truman called the Korean War a “police action”–but it is nevertheless disturbing on several levels. First the administration isn’t leveling with the American public. I am leery of overblown comparisons to Vietnam but it is fair recalling how both the Kennedy and Johnson administration sent troops into harm’s way while denying, at least until 1965, that they were doing so. That is not an example to emulate.
The second and more significant problem with what the administration is doing is that it is probably not leveling with itself. By pretending that U.S. forces aren’t in combat and that the United States is not committed to another war in Iraq, the president is able to tell himself that he is not repeating the same mistakes as his hated predecessor. But the cost of his intent to wage war without admitting that he is doing so is high: Not only in lost credibility but also in missing will.
George W. Bush made a lot of mistakes in Iraq, especially from 2003 to 2007, but the one thing he got right was that he always showed a steely determination to prevail. War is ultimately a test of wills, and if you are facing a determined and dangerous adversary, you had better have a strong desire to prevail. Bush had that. Obama doesn’t. It is plain that this president’s top priority is not to defeat ISIS, as he claims, but to avoid getting further entangled in Iraq.
That is the biggest weakness of the entire U.S. war effort. It helps to explain why we still don’t have adequate resources to battle ISIS and why we lack an adequate politico-military strategy in either Iraq or Syria. The chaos we are seeing in Baghdad is just one sign of how inadequate the U.S. approach has been; the Iraqi government of Haider al-Abadi, which Obama has backed to the hilt, is too busy dealing with internal dissension to focus effectively on the outside threat.
The buck stops in the Oval Office. President Obama doesn’t really deceive the American public or the wider world about what we are up to — everyone knows we are involved in a war — but he is deceiving himself if he thinks that he can fight and win without a serious commitment.
