By David Martosko

From DailyMail.uk | Original Article

President Barack Obama told Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on Friday that the Pentagon can send as many as 1,500 additional ground troops to Iraq as part of the U.S. mission to fight ISIS.

That deployment would approximately double the American military personnel in place there. The Defense Department had until Friday a mandate to send no more than 1,600 troops, and had put 1,400 in the field already.

The White House also asked Congress for $5.6 billion in new war funding, all while insisting that the U.S. military is not using ground forces in a combat role.

Instead, the administration continued to stress on Friday that American personnel would train, advise and assist Iraqi military and Kurdish forces fighting the ISIS terror army.

Commander-inchief: Barack Obama, pictured here on Friday, wants $5.6 billion to send another 1500 troops to Iraq - but he says none will be combat troops

Front line: An Iraqi Turkmen Shiite fighter at a checkpoint near Amerli, 100 miles north of Baghdad, where ISIS militants had the town surrounded

Air power: An American-led alliance is already pounding ISIS targets from the air in both Iraq and Syria, including here above the town of Kobane last month, where the militants are still locked in fierce fighting with Kurds

That explanation, borne of Obama's need to mollify dovish liberals, is beginning to wear thin.

On MSNBC, the cable news network most sympathetic to Obama's foreign policy and national security initiatives, messages crawling across Friday afternoon's programming announced only that the White House had sent 'more ground troops to Iraq.'

A senior administration official told reporters as the weekend approached that the Pentagon had made specific troop enlargement requests 'over the last several weeks.'

Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, said Friday that the move came in response to a need for new support for Iraqi army units outside of Baghdad and Erbil 'at the brigade headquarters level and above.'

That description appeared to rule out embedding U.S. Army regulars with their Iraqi counterparts who engage in direct combat with ISIS forces. Defense Department officials have said, however, that they expect a time to come when they will ask Obama for troops who can go into the field.

One retired senior Pentagon official told MailOnline that it's highly unlikely Americans, Special Forces units in particular, aren't already in harm's way.

'No one really believes the president and his advisers – and they're some smart people – aren't already inserting Special Operators who are armed for combat, probably in both Iraq and Syria,' the former official said on Friday.

Obama is still caught in history's crossfire as ISIS continues its murderous advances toward Baghdad and Damascus.

In 2012 during is re-election campaign he boasted that he 'promised to end the Iraq war, and I did,'

That came less than a year after the last American soldiers left the country, leaving weapons in the hands of Iraqi units that would later abandon them to ISIS, and opening up a power vacuum that Sunni extremists took few months to fill.

Obama cruised to office in 2008 in part on a pledge to untangle the Middle Eastern knot that President George W. Bush had left behind after a decade of deployments in the sand.

Now he's teetering toward undoing history a second time.

The president met Friday afternoon with a bipartisan group of leaders from both houses of Congress. According to a staffer to one of those legislators, Iraqi war funding – and the White House's new request for a go-to-war permission slip from Congress – were on Obama's agenda.

Some Republicans in the room wanted a more aggressive posture from the administration, the aide said, while Democrats cautiously reminded the president that Americans had little appetite for a second drawn-out Iraq war.

Flashpoint: The battle against ISIS has also seen Shiite militias take up arms against the terrorists

Back in: All US combat troops left iraq by 31 December 2011. Among the last out were soldiers of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, who conducted the U.S. military's last combat patrol in the country at Camp Adder, near Nasiriyah, on 16 December

And lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, he said, quizzed Obama about whether he intends to expand his airstrike program to aggressively target the Nusra Front, another Islamist terror group, in Syria.

By mid-October, U.S. Central Command said it had spent $580 million on missions in Iraq and Syria since its deployments began on Aug. 8. That works out to $8.3 million per day.

CENTCOM also says America and its allies in the region have flown more than 8,000 missions over those nations' skies, including airstrikes that dropped nearly 2,200 munitions through Monday.