Top General Says 'There's No Exit Strategy' For War Against ISIS--Alan Grayson calls it "Orwellian"
Top General Says 'There's No Exit Strategy' For War Against ISIS
Posted: 03/26/2015 4:16 pm EDT
WASHINGTON -- Retired Gen. John Allen, the U.S. government's point person for the international fight against the Islamic State, publicly admitted on Thursday what most Americans have long suspected about the United States' newest military conflict. Eight months after the initial bombing campaign began in Iraq, Allen told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that there is no exit plan for what increasingly seems to be an intractable conflict.
During a Thursday morning hearing, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) asked Allen, who in September was appointed as the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, to describe the exit strategy for an eventual conclusion to the war.
Allen responded, “The exit strategy is an Iraq that is territorially secure, sovereign."
"An ISIL that has been denied safe haven, ultimately has been disrupted to the point where it has no capacity to threaten at an existential level the government of Iraq and the nation of the Iraqi people -- and ultimately ends up in a state that does not permit it to threaten the United States or our homeland,” the general said, using the Obama administration’s preferred name for the Islamic State.
“General Allen, that doesn’t sound like a strategy to me, that sounds like a wish list,” Grayson countered.
There’s no exit strategy for this. This is about dealing with Daesh. This is about defeating Daesh. The success of the strategy is not about exit,” Allen eventually said, using the acronym for the Arabic name for the Islamic State.
To lawmakers like Grayson, the lack of an exit strategy suggests that the conflict is bound to devolve into an ongoing quagmire, in troubling echoes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It disturbs me, it’s beyond problematic,” Grayson told The Huffington Post after the hearing. “It’s clear that once we get in, once we get entrenched in the manner that the General is describing, we will literally never get out."
"We’ll see the same kind of forever war forecast in 1984," he added. "It’s Orwellian.”
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The Department of Defense estimates that the daily cost of the campaign against the Islamic State is approximately $8.5 million, or $3.1 billion a year. As a way of sidestepping the spending caps imposed in 2011 under sequestration, House Republicans' budget for fiscal year 2016 puts $96 billion in a separate part of the budget, called Overseas Contingency Operations, which funds overseas conflicts and is not subject to the caps. The proposal provides $38 billion more than what the Obama administration originally requested for OCO.
The budget passed in the House on Wednesday and is expected to go to a vote in the Senate late Thursday night.
Much More at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/26/john-allen-isis-war_n_6949642.html
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