There Are No American Soldiers in Iraq

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Americans used to laugh at the bereted Iraqi Information Minister screaming, “I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad”, even while they could be seen moving into the city.

Now Baghdad Bob’s rhetoric has been transplanted over from Baghdad to Washington D.C.  

Last year, Obama said, “I want to be clear: the American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission.” A good way to get stinking drunk is to drink a shot every time Obama precedes a blatant lie with an “I want to be clear.” And this time was no different.

The year before that he told the American people, “I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria.”

No word on whether soldiers in the "Specialized Expeditionary Targeting Force" will be wearing sandals or slippers as they carry out raids into Syria to free hostages and capture ISIS terrorists.

Obama had assured Americans that the mission “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Did he annex Syria and Iraq as new states while Congress was in recess?

Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton recently said that putting troops on the ground is a “non-starter”. She told CBS that she “cannot conceive of any circumstances where I would agree to do that.” Then she condemned Republicans for calling for “thousands of combat troops”.

As opposed to the 3,000 that were sent there under Obama.

But officially there are no American soldiers in Iraq. There are American advisers in Iraq. Democrats send thousands of heavily armed advisers. It’s the Republicans who are crude enough to send soldiers. Republicans start wars. Democrats have police actions, peacekeeping missions and weekend retreats.

Sometimes they have No-Fly Zones. Hillary Clinton used a No-Fly Zone to invade Libya, kill its leader and turn over half the country to Muslim terrorists leading to the murder of an American ambassador.

But that wasn’t a war. It was an “intervention”. Like the kind you have for a compulsive liar who can’t stop lying, stealing and starting wars and then lying about them.

Now Hillary Clinton wants a No-Fly Zone for Syria. When asked what she would do if Russian planes violate it, she responded, “That would not happen, because we're going to put up a no-fly zone where the Russians are clearly kept informed.”

In the condescending space of liberal foreign policy, the Russians violate airspace because they haven’t been “clearly informed”. It’s inconceivable that they would violate it after being informed.

And maybe handed a shiny new Reset button.

The Russians probably violated Israeli and Turkish airspace because they weren’t informed where the borders were. This summer they flew over to the California coast and radioed saying, "Good morning, American pilots. We are here to greet you on your Fourth of July Independence Day.”

Probably Putin probably hadn’t been “clearly informed” where California was.

What happens if Putin decides to violate Hillary’s No-Fly Zone? Either our pilots will have authorization to shoot down Russian planes or the No-Fly Zone becomes a Pretty Please Don’t Fly Here Zone.

This is a problem since American “advisers” are being embedded with militias that are targeted by Turkey and Russia. If they come under attack, will Hillary authorize air support? Or will they be left to die on the ground just like the Americans in Benghazi were while she polishes her talking points?

Considering the way the war has been fought so far, expect a No-Fly Zone in which everyone goes on flying and bombing while President Clinton II talks up her successful zone that everyone ignores. Just as she talks up her fake Hamas truce and her work “bringing peace” to Northern Ireland.

There will be American soldiers fighting on the ground who won’t officially exist. There will be a No-Fly Zone that will exist, but that everyone will violate. And we will go on flying a lot of missions against ISIS on paper while the vast majority of the time the pilots will be prevented from actually bombing ISIS.

That means the American soldiers who officially don’t exist may not have air support when fighting ISIS.

Meanwhile if any of the Shiite terrorist groups working for Iran decide to kill or kidnap American soldiers, as they have tried to do in the past, their fighters will have air support from the Syrians and the Russians. But if American soldiers do die, Hillary will find a YouTube video somewhere to blame.

This is the insane Baghdad Bob war that Obama and Hillary are fighting.

Hillary Clinton claims that sending American soldiers to fight ISIS wouldn’t work because “the best way to defeat ISIS” is “from the air” and “in cyberspace”.

To defeat ISIS from the air, we actually have to bomb their strongholds. The French bombed Raqqa, but Obama won’t. The same way that Bill Clinton refused to take out Bin Laden in Kandahar.

The Paris attacks got Obama to sign off on bombing ISIS oil trucks after a 45 minute warning. Planes which could crush ISIS were instead reduced to buzzing trucks at low altitude and dropping leaflets "to kind of shoo people away without harming them." The “people” shooed away most likely were ISIS.

After all the recent setbacks in the fight against ISIS, Obama has firmly stated, “I am confident that we can continue building momentum and adding resources to our effort.” And once we’ve built up all that momentum of effort, we’ll be ready for something serious. Like fighting ISIS in “cyberspace”.

The Pentagon is tasked with using “creative and agile concepts… across all available media to most effectively reach target audiences” not to sell diet soda or car insurance, the usual subjects of such advertising jargon, but to stop Muslims from joining ISIS.

While we can’t actually bomb ISIS or officially fight it on the ground, we can roll out an ad campaign full of “creative and agile concepts” that will somehow convince Muslims to stop joining the terror group.

And if there’s anyone that potential ISIS recruits are likely to listen to, it’s the Pentagon. Either that or a Rabbi, a Catholic priest and Hillary Clinton.

The Pentagon has no idea how to do this because its actual job is killing enemies, not tweeting at them.  As the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command put it, there’s a gap in the, “ability to operate on social media... due to a lack of organic capability”.

But in this Baghdad Bob war, the Pentagon is redirected from dropping bombs to fighting with hashtags.

That’s fitting for a war that began with Obama insisting that ISIS was a JV team. Then claiming it was contained right before the Paris attacks. He had reduced the United States to Baghdad Bobism, to offering false claims of victory that no one believes in anymore.

 “They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion… they are trying to sell to the others an illusion," Baghdad Bob used to claim. Then it became the sort of claim Obama got used to making about ISIS.

Obama’s party used to accuse Republicans of lying about Iraq. But lying about Iraq is his only policy.

Instead of fighting a war with guns and bombs, Obama and Hillary have been fighting it with crazy lies. And those crazy lies have a way of getting Americans killed.

The Iraqi Information Minister’s parting remark to the press was, “I now inform you that you are too far from reality.”

The press, Obama and Hillary have joined him in an imaginary world far away from reality in which you win wars by loudly asserting that your lies are reality and reality is a lie. But war is the ultimate test of reality. Bullets don’t care about your fantasies and bombs aren’t interested in your ideology.

The American tanks couldn’t be stopped by all of Baghdad Bob’s crazy lies. ISIS can’t be stopped by any of Obama and Hillary’s crazy lies. Not even if they tell them in “creative and agile” ways on Twitter.