Special: U.S. Expands Footprint in Iraq, Assad Stays in Syria for Now and Budget Negotiations in Congress

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

MS. IFILL: Hello, I’m Gwen Ifill. Joining me around the table: Michael Crowley of POLITICO , Doyle McManus of The Los Angeles Times , and Reid Wilson of The Morning Consult .

It turns out the nation is at war – at least, that’s what Pentagon Secretary Ash Carter told Congress after announcing the U.S. would be expanding its military footprint in Iraq.

SEC. CARTER: (From video.) We’re at war. We’re using the might of the finest fighting force the world has ever known. Tens of thousands of U.S. personnel are operating in the broader Middle East region. More are on the way.

MS. IFILL: “More are on the way.” Now, I have been told not to use the term “boots on the ground” because I am dehumanizing our troops who are in the actual battlefield. But we’re talking about sending a lot more people to Iraq, which sounds familiar.

MR. CROWLEY: Right. Well, so there’s this semantic debate about what is “ground troops,” what is “boots on the ground.” The reality is right now we have about 3,500 personnel – military personnel in Iraq. A lot of them – most of them are doing training and advising missions. None of them are in frontline combat, bang-bang roles, with the exception of small numbers of Special Forces – special operators, and there are actually now some in northern Syria.

And President Obama has made pretty clear –and it was even interesting to hear Hillary Clinton say she couldn’t conceive of the circumstance where she would send sort of the conventional fighting Army – you know, tens of thousands of guys like we saw in 2005, rolling around in patrols, and –

MS. IFILL: Right.

MR. CROWLEY: But what President Obama seems to want to be doing now that he is under enormous pressure to show more results in the campaign against ISIS – which, frankly, does not seem to be going so well, although the administration will say we’ve actually rolled them back, taken back 25 percent of their territory, taken out some of their senior leaders. Nevertheless, what the direction seems to be now is more of these Special Forces, night raids, going in in the middle of the night, and try to kill or capture top leaders. And there’s a – you know, there’s a model for doing that extremely successfully in Iraq sort of around the time of the surge late in the Bush presidency, and Stan McChrystal was the guy who perfected this. You go and you get one guy, you get his cellphones and laptops, you figure out who all his friends and associates are, and you kind of work through the web. And over time they did a great job of dismantling what was then al-Qaida in Iraq, which of course morphed into ISIS. So that’s what they’re hoping to do again.

MS. IFILL: Except, Doyle, as you know, there are still questions about whether this is too little, too slowly.

MR. MCMANUS: Sure. And, in fact, if you compare it to the Iraq surge version that Michael was talking about, and if you talk to people who were involved in that at the time, they’ll say this is a very small number relative to that. In order to do what Michael was talking about – to pick up the intelligence and then run a new raid the same night – you need a bunch of different teams all over the place. You need a lot of helicopters. You need a lot of medevac. That’s not going to be there because at this point this is something in the range of 100, 200 troops, of whom not all of those are the actual shooters and commandos and door-kickers.

So this is – in a sense, this is kind of a pilot program right now. If you were to ask me to bet, I would bet there will be more of this going on a year from now because this is a specialized kind of combat.

MS. IFILL: In fact, the secretary of defense told me that he thinks of 3,500 troops as a floor, not a ceiling by any means.

MR. MCMANUS: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MS. IFILL: Let me ask you, though, about Assad, because as you know the U.S. still – its stated policy is that he should still leave. But in order to enlist other supporters in this effort to rout out ISIS, they seem to be pulling back on that a little bit because that’s not what, say, Russia wants to do.

MR. CROWLEY: Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard him described with the phrase, I think, “an enemy we can work with,” which is an enemy – a friend for now but an enemy later. We might tolerate a longer transition period in some kind of an agreement that would have a peace settlement for Syria. It sounds crazy to talk about such a thing, but it is what – it is at the heart of the president’s strategy right now. And the question is, how long would you tolerate Assad staying? Obama’s dug in pretty firmly on the idea that he has to go at the end of that process, but is seems like the calendar by which we would be willing to tolerate him staying and –

MS. IFILL: Has extended.

MR. CROWLEY: Has extended.

MS. IFILL: Yes?

MR. MCMANUS: And in a sense the problem there is, can we and our allies effectively fight both the Assad regime and ISIS at the same time? And experience pretty conclusively shows that the answer to that is no. And for most Americans, if you want to rank those threats in order, you kind of have to rank ISIS as the immediate short-term threat. I think even John Kerry and Barack Obama would say and Assad is the cause that keeps it there, but it can be considered a long-term threat.

MS. IFILL: Reid, I want to talk to you a little bit. During the regular program you talked a little bit about Congress seeming to get its act together when it came to budgets, got that big highway bill passed. But now comes the next big challenge, and that’s the overall funding – spending plan. Where does that stand now? And are we looking potentially at another shutdown, yet again?

MR. WILSON: I don’t – I think we can take the shutdown –

MS. IFILL: No more on that.

MR. WILSON: – possibility pretty much off the table for now.

MS. IFILL: That would be nice.

MR. WILSON: Remember what happened when John Boehner left the speakership. He sort of set up – set the ball rolling towards a finalized budget agreement. They agreed on topline budget numbers that domestic spending and military spending would both increase by a small margin for the next two years. What they’re trying to –

MS. IFILL: Somewhere on a golf course, John Boehner is saying, I have left this for you. Do what you will.

MR. WILSON: Yes, yes. You guys do what you want. I’m out here playing golf. (Laughter.)

Where we are now is they’ve got the budget, now they’re trying to figure out how to spend it. They’re trying to figure out, you know, department X gets Y number of dollars for this – these various programs.

There are a few sticking points that are left. The sticking points involve Syrian refugees coming to the U.S., what are called policy riders are still hanging out there. Republicans want to force a vote on whether or not we’re going to allow Syrian refugees to come to the U.S.

MS. IFILL: It’s a big sticking point.

MR. WILSON: It’s a huge sticking point, that President Obama has threatened to veto the entire federal budget if that is a policy rider in there.

There are policy riders over the clean coal EPA rules over coal power plants. And something called the waters in the U.S., or WOTUS, that has been debated up in Congress for a very long time – has to do with the Clean Water Act.

So these policy riders are being negotiated now. They have until December 11 ^th to finalize everything. There is the possibility that we could have a continuing resolution, but it would probably be only for a few days rather than for months at a time or even a full year. Congress set the December 11 ^th date so that they would have two weeks before Christmas so that they could bleed over a little bit and not go into the holidays, because woe be it for Congress to stay in town during the holidays. So they’ve got some time. They’ll work on it. But the possibilities of a shutdown are very, very remote.

MS. IFILL: Perhaps it’s a brand-new day. That was my Wiz reference, by – never mind. (Laughter.)

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