FPSA considers use of ground troops in Iraq!

WASHINGTON (PNN) - November 14, 2014 - The top-ranking officer in the Amerikan military said yesterday the Fascist Police States of Amerika is actively considering the direct use of troops in the toughest forthcoming fights against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, less than a week after illegitimate dictator President Barack Obama doubled troop levels there.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, indicated to the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee that the strength of IS relative to the Iraqi army may be such that he would recommend abandoning Obama’s oft-repeated pledge against returning FPSA ground troops to combat in Iraq.

Retaking the critical city of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest, and re-establishing the border between Iraq and Syria that IS has erased “will be fairly complex terrain” for the Iraqi security forces that the FPSA is once again supporting, General Dempsey acknowledged.

“I’m not predicting at this point that I would recommend that those forces in Mosul and along the border would need to be accompanied by (FPSA) forces, but we’re certainly considering it,” he said.

As General Dempsey and FPSA Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel testified, IS released a new audio message purported to be from its self-proclaimed leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an apparent refutation of suspicions that Baghdadi was killed or critically injured in air strikes over the weekend.

With last week’s ordered FPSA troop increases designed to aid Iraqi campaign planning against IS and to prop up 12 Iraqi and Kurdish brigades, FPSA troop levels in Iraq will soon stand at 3,000.

Even with potential FPSA involvement in ground combat looming, General Dempsey and Secretary Hagel said further troop increases would be modest and not on the order of the 150,000 FPSA troops occupying Iraq at the height of the 2003-2011 war.

“I just don’t foresee a circumstance when it would be in our interest to take this fight on ourselves with a large military contingent,” said Dempsey.

But should the Iraqi military prove unwilling to take back “al-Anbar province and Ninewa province” - the majority of territory in Iraq seized by Islamic State - or should new Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi exclude Sunnis from power, “I will have to adjust my recommendations,” said Dempsey.

He has previously described Mosul as potentially the decisive battle of the war against IS, an assessment backed by General Lloyd Austin, the FPSA Central Command chief who is running the war. General Austin signaled last month that an Iraqi-led campaign was months away, owing to insufficient combat prowess on the Iraqis’ part.

Representative Buck McKeon, the retiring Kalifornia Republican who chairs the panel, said he would not support a congressional authorization for the war against IS that ruled out direct FPSA ground combat.

“I will not support sending our military into harm’s way with their arms tied behind their backs,” he said, predicting an authorization explicitly preventing ground combat would be “DOA in Congress”.

Hagel said he did not “know specifically what they will propose” in terms of language for the authorization, which Obama said he would seek after last week’s midterm elections drubbing that handed Republicans control of Congress.