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By Miriam Raftery
November 18, 2014 (San Diego’s East County)—Last week, President Barack Obama announced that he is sending an additional 1,500 U.S. troops to Iraq to train and advise Iraqi and Kurdish forces in the region, doubling the current number of troops deployed there. The President will also ask Congress for an addition $5.6 billion to help fight the terrorist group ISIL (also known as ISIS), or the Islamic State.
Reactions to the news are mixed locally.
Mark Arabo, head of the Neighborhood Market Association and a national spokesman for Iraqi-Chaldean Christians in America, says, “The addition of 1,500 ground troops to combat ISIL shows that the battle against Islamic extremism is one that will require time, energy, and resources .”
Arabo initially opposed boots on the ground, but as the genocide and torture of Christians and other minorities at the hands of ISIL has accelerated in the region, his position has changed.
In an e-mail sent to media, Arabo now states, “The Chaldean Christian community of San Diego welcomes the American presence in Iraq, because the survival of Christianity within the region is greatly dependent upon a U.S ground presence. It has become alarmingly clear that ISIL will not be eliminated with airstrikes alone. Their deterioration will come only after America, and like minded nations unify against this ruthless brand of evil promoted by ISIL."
But Gilbert Fields, director for communications at San Diego Veterans For Peace, said he believes sending additional troops to the Middle East is a “terrible idea, one counter-productive to our overall interests and values.” Fields spoke to ECM as an individual but said he believes his thoughts represent views of the majority of Veterans for Peace members locally.
Fields opposed U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2003 and believes involvement in Afghanistan should have been limited to international action to find those responsible for the 9-11 attacks. “We should have learned by now, based on Vietnam and other tragedies, that the use of a huge Army or Marine Corps ground force, when one is dealing with a relatively small group of terrorists, is often counterproductive to the overall mission,” he observed.
Despite atrocities committed by ISIL and requests for U.S. intervention to protect, Fields is emphatic in his opinion that “we should have long ago removed all of our troops from the area, and certainly not be planning to send anymore back into the overall mess that has been created, by us and others, by the overall breakdown in law and order than Saddam Hussein and others despots so ruthlessly kept under control. If one is going to fight against a terrible group like ISIS, one must be fighting on behalf of a better group, one that has worthy interests that we can hold up as being worth our troops lives and our national treasure. Given that the fighting in the Middle East dates back 1400 years when the Sunni and Shia factions of Islam began their hostilities, I see no “good guys” in the current fighting that are worthy of our support,” he elaborated. “ISIS is an extremist Sunni group, the Iraq government has been taken over (with our help) by Shia extremists, and the Kurds in the north of Iraq are out for themselves, hoping that now might be a good time to create an independent Kurdistan that they have always wished for, and that Turkey fears most. When one throws the Syrian government into the mix, along with the hundreds of different and often countervailing “free Syrian forces”, who we do not know and know we cannot trust, the situation appears virtually impossible for us to have any real impact, as we cannot really know who we should side with.”
He added that Veterans For Peace values humanitarian aid, however, for all civilians caught up in this situation, recognizing that delivery of aid is usually done by locals or international civilian agencies, not by an outside western military force.
He concludes, “By our actions in 2001 and 2003, we have re-opened a 1400 year old religious war between various moderate and extreme factions of Islam, and have also helped create a situation where the most radical groups can thrive. We should be ashamed of what we have created, but we should stop making matters worse by picking sides among the least worst groups, that we still do not understand. “
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