General won’t rule out troops
Chairman of Joint Chiefs raises prospect of U.S. boots on ground in Iraq; White House downplays
WASHINGTON — Gen. Martin Dempsey, the military’s top officer, repeatedly raised the prospect Tuesday of sending U.S. troops to fight alongside Iraqi soldiers against Islamic State militants, despite President Barack Obama’s vows not to do so.
Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he would recommend using U.S. ground troops to assist Iraqi and Kurdish forces if he deems it necessary to rescue a downed pilot, to call in airstrikes to assist Iraqi forces or to help assault a key military objective, such as the captured city of Mosul.
“If we reach the point where I believe our advisers should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific ISIL targets, I’ll recommend that to the president,” Dempsey said in prepared testimony, using one of several abbreviations for Islamic State.
The White House quickly moved to clarify Dempsey’s remarks, calling them “a hypothetical scenario.”
Col. Edward Thomas, a spokesman for Dempsey, later issued a statement saying the general believes the president’s strategy is ap- propriate and “doesn’t believe there is a military requirement” for U.S. advisers to accompany Iraqi troops into combat.
The incident suggested a growing rift between the White House and Pentagon at the outset of the intervention, much as Obama overruled Dempsey’s recommendations in 2012 to train Syrian rebels seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad.
White House officials have been frustrated in recent days as Pentagon officials described military plans before the president was ready to approve them, said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal debate.
“Dempsey views his role as the guy who tells it like it is without a political filter,” said Samuel Brannen, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Pentagon strategist. “He wants to make sure that the American people know what they’re getting into and he’s just being more candid than the administration.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if Dempsey’s warnings, a day before Obamaheads to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida for briefings by top military commanders, were meant to ready the public for a reversal in strategy or aimed at congressional hawks who have criticized Obama’s strategy as too little, too late, to roll back the Sunni extremists who have overrun much of eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq.
Dempsey told the committee that U.S. troops may be required “at some point” to help Iraqi and Kurdish security forces retake Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities, which fell to the militants in June. Thousands of Iraqi troops fled during the insurgents’ advance, abandoning large stores of heavy weapons and ammunition to them, and U.S. airstrikes in an urban area would likely kill Sunni Arab civilians.
Fresh fighting was reported on distant eastern and western flanks of Mosul on Tuesday, as Kurdish guerrillas supported by U.S. surveillance aircraft pushed the first counteroffensive back toward the key city.
Appearing at the same hearing, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel outlined a military plan far broader than previously acknowledged for eventual U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State strongholds and other targets inside Syria.
Hagel said the Pentagon is planning “targeted actions against ISIL safe havens in Syria, including its command and control, logistics capabilities and infrastructure.”
Hagel warned that the campaign “will not be an easy or a brief effort. It is complicated. We are at war with ISIL, as we are with al-Qaida.”
The hearing was interrupted several times by pro- testers from Code Pink, an anti-war group, who shouted and waved signs opposing the U.S. role.
The testimony rippled through closed-door briefings Tuesday on Capitol Hill, where members shared concerns about the White House plan to train and arm 5,000 Syrian fighters over the next year at bases in Saudi Arabia.
But leaders from both parties expressed confidence that the House will vote Wednesday to support the president’s request to support arming and training the “moderate” rebel fighters
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he expected the measure to pass the Republican-controlled House.
“There’s a lot more that we need to be doing, but there’s no reason for us not to do what the president asked us to do,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he expected the measure to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate after the House vote.
But Rep. Jim Himes, DConn., a member of the House intelligence committee, said Dempsey’s use of what Himes called the “Gword,” referring to ground troops, had injected uncertainty.
“That’s going to change the dynamic a little bit for some people,” he said.
Lisa Mascaro and Kathleen Hennessey in Washington and Patrick McDonnell in Beirut contributed.
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