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Gen. McInerney: Sharing Mosul Plans 'Aiding and Abetting the Enemy'
Thursday, February 19, 2015 10:55 PM
By: Greg Richter
Retired Gen. Thomas McInerney said the United States is "aiding and abetting the enemy" by announcing it is training 20,000 Iraqi troops to retake the city of Mosul this spring.
"It's absolutely bewildering," McInerney said Thursday on Fox News Channel's "The Kelly File." "I do not understand why the president and the administration want to aid and abet the enemy."
Host Megyn Kelly asked if it could be a strategy to get the enemy to retreat from Mosul, Iraq's second largest city.
McInerney admitted that is a possibility, but added the Islamic State (ISIS) has not been acting like it would leave Mosul.
"They're going to stay probably, and it's still going to expose our forces to a certain risk because they're going to be doing a lot of defensive preparations," he said. "All those kind of things that are going to make our troops more vulnerable."
President Barack Obama has said repeatedly that America is not at war with Islam. He says calling ISIS Islamic or Muslim would play into their hands that they are fighting a holy war and they would use it in their recruitment efforts.
"That's why I disagree with him," McInerney said. "When he doesn't know the threat he's fighting, radical Islam, that's why he and his State Department spokesman talk about jobs and talk about all this soft-power type stuff."
McInerney said the troops he talks with are astonished that their commander in chief does not appear to know what the threat is.
"Look, when a mother convinces a 12-year-old son to be a shahid, a martyr, and blow himself up and kill 200 innocent women and children, getting him a job is not going to deter him from doing that. You have got to go and address the ideological problem."
That means going to Mecca, Medina, and the mosques to persuade Muslim leaders to change the ideology, he said.
"Say 'this is insane, this is wrong, we need to change,'" as Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordan's King Abdullah have urged in their calls to reform Islam, McInerney said. "We need to be enlisting those people as well as the king of Saudi Arabia and get them involved."
An official from U.S. Central Command said Thursday that American military forces will train 20,000-25,000 Iraqi fighters to retake Mosul from 1,000-2,000 ISIS fighters as early as April or May.
The plans were previously known, Bloomberg News reports, but Thursday's briefing provided more detail, including the number of troops.
Though the strike force would be Iraqi, American air power would support the mission, and some U.S. forces might be used to call in airstrike targets. America also would supply logistics and intelligence.
McInerney was not the only person to criticize the public announcement. Fox News Channel analysts Andrew Napolitano and Charles Krauthammer said the United States is giving up the element of surprise, with Napolitano, a retired judge, saying it is "almost a violation of law by revealing national security secrets to the enemy."
Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, told Fox's Kelly that if a private in Iraq had revealed such planning even inadvertently, he might have faced a court-martial. Now, he said, it has become almost routine for the Obama administration to announce war plans in advance.
"It only increases risks," Cotton said, speculating that the announcement might have been made to counter criticism Obama has faced over his just-completed three-day counterterrorism summit.
Obama was criticized for not using the term "Islamic terrorists" and for inviting controversial Islamic figures to the summit.
