The Washington Post editorial board sees parallels, HERE, between the “surge” ordered by President George W. Bush in Iraq to the dispatching of 300 advisors by President Obama.

I actually see more of a parallel to the MAG (Military Advisory Group) advisors sent to Vietnam by President John F. Kennedy during my three-year Army hitch in the early sixties.  The troops assigned to the MAG outfits were also supposed to advise only, but the scuttlebutt they spread in the NCO club upon rotation back to the States was that the typical South Vietnamese Army soldier couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, and if there were any real fighting to be done, the American Army was going to have to do it.  Taking that view to heart, Kennedy began the ramp-up that Johnson, his successor, took to it’s eventual conclusion.

In order to be effectual, the advisors will need to interact with local and regional Iraqi Army commanders on or near the battlefields.  However, my guess is that, in the absence of a new Status Of Forces agreement that protects them properly, they will be a new variety of FOBbit, spending all their time inside the protected Bagdahd Green Zone, or in regional equivalents, thereby insuring that they are nothing more than the token assistance that the President intends them to be.