OPINION_ Doyle McManus: Obama steps away from the Powell Doctrine

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Doyle McManus: Obama steps away from the Powell Doctrine

By Doyle McManus
Los Angeles Times
11/28/2014 5:32 PM


President Obama has drawn a line to limit what American troops will do in the fight against the Islamic State: They can advise, assist and train Iraqi forces, but they will not participate in ground combat.

We’re three months into our newest war, the one against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and nobody’s happy with how it’s going.

Hawks complain that President Obama isn’t committing enough military force to win. Doves, noting that Obama just doubled the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, worry that the conflict will become the kind of slippery slope that drew us into quagmires such as Vietnam. And critics on both sides charge that the administration has no clear strategy for success.

There’s an element of truth in all those critiques, but they all miss the point.

What has so many people perplexed, I think, is that in Iraq, Obama has – without announcing it – broken with a principle that has dominated U.S. military thinking for nearly a quarter of a century: the Powell Doctrine.

The Powell Doctrine is a set of war principles laid out by Gen. Colin Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1990s. Among other things, Powell felt that the United States should no longer fight the kind of “limited war” it had tried to fight in Vietnam. If the United States went to war again, he advised, it should use all the military power at its command to win as quickly and decisively as possible.

That was the thinking that guided the first Gulf War in 1991, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and even – in different forms – the long counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed.

Not so in the fight against Islamic State – even though Obama and his aides have described the group as a direct threat to U.S. citizens and U.S. interests.

This time, the president has drawn a line to limit what American troops in Iraq will do: They can advise, assist and train Iraqi forces, but they will not participate in ground combat.

Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a congressional hearing this month that the Powell Doctrine of maximum available force wasn’t suited to a situation like the one posed by Islamic State.

“I just don’t see it in our interest to take this fight on ourselves with a large military contingent,” Dempsey said. Too much U.S. force, he warned, could “generate antibodies within the population that could actually be counterproductive to what you’re trying to achieve.”

This time, he said, instead of “taking ownership” of the war, the United States wants to make sure ownership stays with the Iraqis, “and then hold them accountable for the outcomes.”

And that’s how Obama hopes to avoid a slippery slope: by drawing a firm limit to U.S. involvement. The limit isn’t the number of troops in Iraq, which is growing from about 1,600 to about 3,100. It’s in the prohibition against ground combat and in the insistence that aid will flow only as long as the Iraqi government pulls its weight.

What are the risks of ignoring the Powell Doctrine?

One is that the conflict will last longer. The other risk is that limiting U.S. involvement is no guarantee against future pressure to take another step down the slippery slope.

And if the conflict drags on long enough, we will have a new president in office, facing the same pressure to do more. Every politician who’s thinking about running for president right now should be praying earnestly that Obama’s Plan A works.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article4189603.html#storylink=cpy

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