The host of Fox’s “Shepherd Smith Reporting” went off on President Obama’s decision to send more American troops to Iraq after promising no boots on the ground, accusing the president of having an “asinine” and “unbelievable” policy on combating ISIS:
FOX NEWS’ CHRIS WALLACE: You know, I don’t want to overstate but I’ve got to say, for those of us who are old enough to have lived through it, this has a little bit of the scent of Vietnam.
SMITH: It absolutely does!
WALLACE: We remember in the early ’60s when President Kennedy sent in a few hundred advisers, and then it was a few thousand, and then it ended up being 15,000. We know how that ended up. Not saying this is going to end up the same way, but now as we’re doubling from a few hundred, then 1500, now it’s 3,000, it does have the scent of Vietnam about it.
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SMITH: Anybody who didn’t see this coming, I don’t understand it. The President said– whether this is true or not is another matter—but the President said the goal is to degrade and eventually destroy ISIS, and at the same time said, there is no military solution, and the only way you can even begin to do it is by putting ground troops on the ground, but we’re not going to put any ground troops on the ground. So you state a goal that is absolutely 100 percent unachievable, given the parameters you have laid out. That’s asinine! It’s unbelievable!
WALLACE: I won’t go as far as that but I will say there has been a contradiction between the President’s end, as you say, destroy ISIS, and his means, which has again been defined by what he wasn’t going to do, that didn’t make any sense. There are a lot of people at the pentagon are very upset. There are a lot of people on Capitol Hill who are upset, and you see with the doubling of the number of ground troops in Iraq, the President running into the reality that what he wants to achieve and how he wants to achieve it just don’t square up with each other.