Obama Has Learned Nothing, and He Has Forgotten Nothing*

And the escalation in Iraq continues:

President Obama has authorized the deployment of up to 450 more American troops to Iraq to train and assist the Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State, the White House announced on Wednesday, signaling a major shift of focus in the fight against the Sunni militant group.

The United States forces will use Al Taqqadum, an Iraqi base near the town of Habbaniya in eastern Anbar Province, as their training hub, the White House said. Mr. Obama opted to send them at the request of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq, and after consultation with Ashton B. Carter, the secretary of defense, and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“These new advisers will work to build capacity of Iraqi forces, including local tribal fighters, to improve their ability to plan, lead and conduct operations against ISIL in eastern Anbar under the command of the prime minister,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said in a statement, referring to the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL. “This train, advise and assist mission builds on lessons learned during the past several months and is just one aspect of our commitment to support the Iraqi Security Forces.”

Al Taqqadum is near the front lines with ISIS in Iraq.

What could possibly go wrong?

“These new advisers will work to build capacity of Iraqi forces, including local tribal fighters, to improve their ability to plan, lead and conduct operations against ISIL in eastern Anbar under the command of the prime minister,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said in a statement, referring to the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL. “This train, advise and assist mission builds on lessons learned during the past several months and is just one aspect of our commitment to support the Iraqi Security Forces.”

Mr. Obama will also speed up the delivery of weapons and equipment to Iraqi forces, including pesh merga and tribal fighters who are under Iraqi command.

So, we will somehow being improving the the Iraqi military, all while giving large quantities of weapons to the Iraqi military, which is where ISIS got many of its weapons from.

Shortly after entering office, Obama, and most of his cabinet, read the book Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, which argued that the disaster in Vietnam was driven by a military that did not understand the war or the bigger picture, while around the same time, the Generals were reading A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, which argues that we were winning the war in the 1970s, and would have won, if not for those meddling kids if the civilian leadership and the general public had not lost their nerve.

If you take advice on the making of war from a community that holds themselves blameless for our loss in Vietnam (i.e the military) and holds literally everyone else in the United States at fault, this is not a recipe for successful policy prescriptions.

After all, the US Military still promulgates the myth that it never lost a battle in Vietnam, (we lost at least 70 battles), and David Petraeus literally wrote this into his doctoral thesis.

Note that even after his guilty plea for giving classified information to his mistress and lying to law enforcement about this, he is still consulting with the White House on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To not quote Talleyrand,^† "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake."

^*Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié. This generally ascribed to Talleyrand, referring to the general idiocy returned Bourbon monarchs after Napoleon's final defeat. It is likely that the quote did not come from him.
^†Again, this is probably not an actually a quote from Tallyrand. It was likely said by Joseph Fouché, but, "C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute," is all too frequently credited to Talleyrand.