GOP senator blasts military for revealing strategy against ISIS

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is questioning why a senior military official disclosed a plan to use as many as 25,000 Iraqi fighters to dislodge fighters with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) from Mosul, the country’s second largest city.
 
“It’s very mystifying why this administration would reveal potential plans to retake Mosul,” Cotton, a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, said during an interview Thursday on Fox News’s “The Kelly File.”

“If a private in Iraq had revealed this kind of planning inadvertently by leaving a plan in the channel hall of the gym, he might have faced a court-martial, but now it’s now become a matter of policy this administration is going to announce war plans in advance,” he continued. “It only increases risks.”
 
Earlier Thursday a U.S. Central Command official told reporters during a briefing that up to 2,000 ISIS fighters hold the city and that, in order to avoid the summer heat and the start of Ramadan in June, the offensive likely would begin by April or May.
 
ISIS captured Mosul, which has a population of more than 1 million people, in June. Its fall set alarm bells ringing on Capitol Hill over the threat posed by the terror group that controls other large chunks of territory in Iraq and Syria.
 
Cotton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, speculated that revealing the timing of the offensive might be connected to the White House’s summit on Countering Violent Extremism.
 
He said, when president holds such an event and “they talk about social workers and the fact that we won’t name their enemy and then right on the heels of that, they reveal very sensitive war plans that are going to put our troops and Iraqi troops at greater risk, it invites that kind of analysis.”
 
The three-day summit, which concluded Thursday night, was dogged by criticism from members of both parties for not defining the enemy as radical Muslims.
 
Cotton said, “It’s essential if you want to defeat an enemy, to name with that enemy, yes, and our enemy is not some kind of undefined violent extremist, it’s a strain of radical Islam, that is trying to kill us here in the United States and to kill Americans and our allies all around the world.”
 
He also said there are “many reports” from military leaders and active-duty troops that the White House is  “micromanaging this war to a degree that they have never seen before.”