Was it time to change strategy?
Advertisement
Meanwhile, the Russians and the French have started fighting back, launching airstrikes against the ISIS capital. The world is screaming out for USA leadership, but the president just isn’t up to the job.
Among a series of issues tested in last week’s nationwide poll, Mr. Obama’s handling of the threat from ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria earned him the lowest marks from the public. We can’t cooperate with it, we can’t convert it and we can’t contain it. We must defeat it.
But so far we have no Churchill or FDR, no Reagan or Thatcher or Pope John Paul II. As it stands now, Obama does not want to make such a fateful decision because he wants to bookend his legacy as the peace president, between George W. Bush and next November’s victor.
This September, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the U.S. Homeland Security Committee, introduced a bill that would require the U.S. Congress to take an up-or-down vote on Syrian immigration and also prioritize the settlement of “persecuted” religious minorities. He says critics have suggested things he’s already doing.
Fighter jets, bombers, attack planes and drones are dropping an average of 2,228 bombs per month on targets ranging from training camps and machine gun positions to oil facilities and weapons shacks. But it won’t happen without American taking the lead.
Baghdadi has galvanised militants from around the world, encouraged by his military successes and plans to redraw the map of the Middle East to create a self-sustaining caliphate. They don’t know the same God I know, because God told us to love one another in his word. Putin, Assad, even the hacktivist group Anonymous could play a role.
Of the 1,869 Syrian refugees admitted to the US this year, 25 are Christian, according to the Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing System website. There is collateral damage in war. We are at war with Islamic jihadists. Bomb their oil fields and refineries. The majority of the group’s money comes from oil sales to local traders from wells under its control.
That’s exactly the question The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood tackled earlier this year in a an in-depth analysis of the group for an article titled, “What ISIS Really Wants”, now being recirculated.
It has released many hostage execution videos to threaten the West and admonish its Arab allies for targeting the group. They wonder why the world’s greatest military can’t do that.
This is what we have to teach our enemies and those tempted to join them: disenchantment.
Islamic State: This is the English version of what the terror group calls itself.
Yesterday, he condemned the Paris attacks as a “cowardly act of war carried out by ISIS barbarians”.
Wood paints Islam as central to the explanation of the behavior of ISIS.
Fifth, encourage Islam’s leading clerics to speak out against the extremists.
Sixth, launch cyberwarfare against ISIS.
“Some armed opposition groups consider it possible to begin active operations against ISIS with Russia’s support and we are ready to provide such support from the air”.
Pursuing “limited” military means “tends to be the worst of the military options, because where it leads us is mission creep”. Arm the Kurds and the Anbar Sunni tribes directly. But he singled out a few outside actors as well, including the US. A better way to use our resources efficiently is to profile for terrorist behavior patterns. If we focus on everyone, we focus on no one.
Ninth, Don’t accept refugees we can’t vet.
The national debate over whether the USA should be admitting more Syrian refugees has been escalating in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Then, in the next breath, he states there will be “no change” in his dealings with ISIS.
Yet the threat continues to grow.
ISIS will take advantage of America’s compassion. That led to a very uncomfortable moment when CNN’s Jim Acosta reminded Obama that “this is an organization that you once described as a JV team”, and asked how Obama could possibly describe them as “contained”. You can go after territorial holdings, but there is also an ideological element that it seems would make them a hard group to fight.
We can laugh at the absurdity of their goals, or dismiss them as the “JV team”, or try to win their hearts and minds, or divert their anger with a jobs summit. But our efforts need a leader. It can’t be Putin, and it can’t be Hollande.
On the ground these days, ISIS is engaged in a war of inches that will likely test its capacity to the limits, like its (lack of) ability to manage and operate supply lines, for example.
Advertisement
But now the organisation must endure the wrath of the U.S. and its allies in co-ordination with Russian Federation, or not, as the case may be.
