Odierno, the outgoing Army chief of employees, backed the present technique towards Islamic State, telling his final Pentagon information convention that whereas U.S. troops might defeat the militants, they might not remedy the broader political and financial issues besetting Iraq and Syria.
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The Army’s retiring top officer says the time may come when the U.S. should consider embedding American forces in Iraqi units to help advise them. In a major national security speech on Tuesday, Jeb Bush criticized Clinton and President Barack Obama for removing U.S. troops from Iraq.
“If we find in the next several months that we’re not making the progress that we should have, we should probably consider embedding some soldiers with them, see if that would make a difference”. He said a U.S.-led bombing campaign had helped blunt the offensive by Islamic State, which overran the northwestern part of Iraq last year, but said “right now we are kind of in a stalemate, frankly”.
Odierno is stepping down and will retire on Friday after 39 years in the military and four years at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
“As it turns out, they weren’t prepared to handle it”, he said. To say we shouldn’t have went in there now because we know there wasn’t any or we didn’t find any, I think is a little bit of hindsight. “The U.S. can’t solve this”.
When asked about the future of Iraq, Odierno said that reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis in the country is becoming harder and that partitioning the country “might be the only solution”.
When U.S soldiers were in Iraq during the last decade, it “allowed us to be honest brokers” between different sects, Odierno said.
“For me it’s about changing the dynamics, the political dynamics, the economic dynamics and it has to be done by those in the region”, Odierno said.
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In other comments, he called Russian Federation the most unsafe military threat to the U.S. right now, because Moscow is “more mature” than many other U.S. adversaries and has shown significant, sophisticated capabilities in its invasion of Ukraine. “The U.S. can’t solve this”, he said.
