Jon Stewart shreds our inaction at Kobani, when the ISIS forces were operating large armored formations outside the town, virtually begging to be wiped out from the air, and we took little or no action to stop them. Now they're in the town while sending in large numbers of reinforcements to assure victory, so Kobani's fall is inevitable. Meanwhile Turkey has started bombing - the Kurds, and refuses to let the US operate from bases inside Turkey. Administration officials are saying that Kobani isn't strategic enough to worry about (even though it completes an important, direct route from Aleppo to Raqqa), and claim they're looking at the larger picture - which I suppose includes the upcoming takeover of Ramadi and the rest of Al Anbar province and a big battle in Baghdad.
Maybe our strategy is to let things get so out of hand that we have to "go all out" and crush ISIS with a quickness so we can say "see? You can't do this without America" thus strengthening our military status in the world. Or not...................
Well, one off-the-record Pentagon official says this is Obama's Vietnam, noting truly eerie similarities, although I put them down more to pattern recognition, like seeing shapes in clouds. An insurgency was what we thought we were fighting in Vietnam long after it ceased to be an insurgency (it was actually a simple case of the North wanting to conquer the South, the same as North Korea), and insurgency would only parallel the very early days of the Syrian rebellion. What exists now is Syria and Iraq is an expansive terrorist army that's fighting a conventional and well planned expansive ground war. Instead of fighting the war we've got with the army we have, the Administration is flailing around trying to change the pieces and players, and abjectly failing at it. Turkey won't allow any operations from Turkish territory, including Kurdish operations, until we agree to focus on Assad. But if we focus on Assad we just make it easier for ISIS to take over the rest of Syria. Turkey would probably be okay with that. In letting the Kurds get crushed, Turkey is reducing a domestic threat, although it removes some of the legitimacy from the anti-Assad struggle, it will likely make the anti-Assad ISIS forces much stronger, and present an even greater threat to Assad's regime. It is doubtful that we'll ever get on the same page.
I don't see a lot of parallels with Vietnam. There are distinct differences, such as the number and variety of regional countries allied with us, the number and variety of internal elements arrayed against ISIS, the lack of a rival super power, etc. That doesn't mean it can't or won't become a quagmire, but then, that is not so much a Vietnam specific pattern as it is a US in any asymmetric conflict pattern. When it's not an existential threat, we aren't big on doing the job to completion.
I mean this as serious advice, so please take it for whatever it's worth: When a fairly diverse group of people (Faceman, Flashlight, Dead Sokar, Ancalagon, evenflow, We Are Borg, just to name a few) think you're just a little batshit crazy, it's probably time to take a good hard look in the mirror and seek help.
Oh, and look what we have here: http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/2647910/ So, yes, there was some recent yowling about how "ISIS is just like Vietnam!" Next?
So, the war that Obama says will drag on for years, against an opponent which his Administration describes as an incredibly serious threat to the West, is only allowed to have one thread - ever, even as events on the ground rapidly shift?
Did he purportedly say "it will drag on for years" before or after events on the ground began to shift? It's important.
Nukes? Or really big conventional bombs, to avoid steppin' over dat big bad nuclear red line. A 70 ton uberbomb chucked out the back of a C-17. Hmm... 70 tons of RDX would be the equivalent of 112 tons of TNT. A hair over a tenth of a kiloton. Build and drop a few of those on ISIS concentrations and watch them start rolling over and dying. Psychology...
No reason to go nuclear - we still have the MOAB. That said when you have a very fluid target with no actual military targets worth destroying other than very spread out soldiers the MOAB is pissing on a forest fire.
ISIS is within 8 miles of the Baghdad airport and they have SAMs, so evacuation of the 1,100 American military personnel and embassy staff may already be a problem. If Baghdad falls we're pretty much out of least-bad options.
Those would be the same Shia militias that haven't dislodged ISIS from the edge of Baghdad. As we saw in Kobani, ISIS also has heavy armor, and they have US built GPS guided artillery with a range of 20 miles, SAMs, advanced anti-tank missiles (from Saudi Arabia), and lots of other weapons. The Shias, meanwhile, have been carrying out attacks on non-ISIS Iraqi Sunnis, so we might see quite a lot of Baghdad Sunnis changing sides. Once the street fighting starts, the situation is going to get dicey, because Obama will probably pull our boots out and that will make air power vastly less effective, not that it's been very effective up to this point. In Kobani it was so bad that the Pentagon said one attack took out a tank, a heavy machine gun, and a fighting position. You could translate that last part as "We made a foxhole bigger."
If ISIS is that close they should hold that position (don't advance further) while they are reinforced from any and all supporters. Get a good supply and logistics chain established then let it rock. If they don't go on the obvious offensive we won't do shit other than superficial eyewash like making foxholes bigger. They can spring their trap when they are ready. Time really is on their side as they gain more momentum. Just my two cents.
I agree. I think they'll hold their position until they consolidate some of the rear areas and take hubs like Ramadi. Their waiting game just keeps Baghdad sweating, and since they can keep track of what's going on in Baghdad (with thousands of informants and insiders), they're probably not going to get caught off guard by the glacial pace of Iraqi military preparations. The more Baghdad sweats, the more Shia families will decide it's safer to move south to Kut and Basra, or into Iran, making ISIS's task easier. ISIS has seen the stampede effect work time after time, and large cities like Mosul fell to them with shocking ease. Taking Baghdad for the Islamic Caliphate (it used to be a capital of older Caliphates) would electrify the radical Islamic world, causing more and more jihadist groups to join with them and showing the entire region that they are the new heirs. The Taliban have already joined, backing the strong horse. As was predicted long ago, our withdrawal from Iraq has probably made a re-invasion with heavy ground forces inevitable. War on the cheap doesn't work when your opponent is fanatically serious and very well organized.
I have a hard time seeing the western strategy behind all this. Yea I get it, sending in the boots isn't the popular thing to do. But this isn't a popularity contest and it can't be won from the air even when Sultan Erdogan decides to open the (NATO!) bases in Turkey. With all the IS successes I wonder, who has West Point, Sandhurst or St. Cyrians and who is a rag tag band of marauding crazies with too much money? IS doesn't even have very broad support within the population, with them cutting off the heads of whoever they deem unworthy of whatever. I wonder if there is some master plan behind the reluctance. I doubt it. We're seeing a new and much worse Afghanistan being formed before our eyes here. I guarantee that there'll have to be a bloody, messy invasion within the next decade if they aren't crushed now. In more uplifting news, IS seems to have Saddam's old chemical weapons now. Another Bush blunder - go to war to find an active WMD program, find only the remains of an inactive one... and leave it there to not rot. I wonder if they pay overtime in the afterlife since IS certainly keeps the welcoming commitee busy.
No. Read the article, read it all the way through. Also, bonus points if you try to actually understand the words on the page.
