275

That is the number of troops the POTUS is sending to reinforce our embassy in Iraq as the ISIS horde sweeps through the country.

Our embassy there is the most expensive, advanced, and biggest (containing 8 football fields worth of space) ever built by the US. It is a fortress that would make the empires of old jealous. The ISIS advance makes it clear that the supposed 900,000 man Iraqi army that we trained simply doesn't have the will or conviction to fight in large numbers. The ISIS force is estimated at 10,000 (on the high side). The theory is that they (the Iraqis) have fallen back to Baghdad to protect the capital. However, my own sense of historical battles tells me this is a military maneuver designed to repel an enemy that outnumbers you, that you cannot hope to face in the open field, not one that you outnumber 9 to 1. So I am dubious about that "theory", to say the least. In my estimation the only way to prevent the fall of Baghdad, and the subsequent overrun of "fortress Iraq" (our embassy), is to send in 10,000 Marines. Personally, I no longer trust the "warmongering" G.W. Bush to allow these Marines to engage in total war, so I especially oppose this president essentially starting the war over - retake Baghdad, Mosul, Tikrit, and on and on and on. It would be the worst "do-over" in the history of mankind. This entire fiasco is the result of piece meal, politically correct war making, and as I stated the other day we will be engaged in an never ending game of whack-a-mole, sending troops in to beat fundamentalist hordes back, leaving, then returning again until some Iraqi George Washington steps up and leads his people to the promised land.

What immediately occurs to me as I consider the prospect of our boys fighting until the Iraqis step up, is that if the Iraqi force is even half of the estimated 900k, and they can't turn back 10,000, then that whack-a-mole game will be played by generations of Americans - my sons, their sons, and their sons. And even then the Iraqi people may not step up. If the Iraqis do not make a stand here and push this force back into Syria, we will have final proof that our experiment of democratizing the Near East has failed. As of 2014 they will have proven unready for the responsibility of defending and maintaining a republic. It is my opinion that they simply do not have the intimate familiarity with, and inherent desire for freedom the way we do, and I am done using the lives of US Marines to try and convince them of the contrary. We CAN beat this ISIS horde, no question. But much in the way you can make the scam of social security work on paper, the real life application of sending in our boys by the thousands - correction, REsending in our boys by the thousands - is  fraught with the human errors of our civilian leadership whom have proved themselves incapable (in either party) of committing to the concept of total war.

So to say this as succinctly as possible - if the Iraq force cannot repel ISIS from Baghdad and begin retaking those cities ON THEIR OWN, then we leave. Period.

In that context I have a simple question. What can 275 soldiers do much more effectively than 10,000?

Answer: evacuate an embassy.

As of now I fully expect my sons to witness what their grandfather's did in South East Asia... a last helicopter desperately trying to depart an embassy under attack. The word "sad" is incomprehensibly inadequate to describe what we are seeing. And yes Titus, I did expect this to end differently. I honestly thought that the desire for freedom was universal. They may not have wanted Saddam, but neither do they want a pluralistic society, not in large enough numbers. Islam is too potent a force, the commitment to its' law too appealing for too many for western style governance to take hold. And as we've seen in every conflict throughout history - the most committed wins.