Necessity

11 September 2014

Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Obama Promises to Go After ISIS Anywhere

In a prime-time TV speech, President Obama promised the American people and the world that his administration took seriously the threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS, also known as ISIL, replacing Syria with Levant]. The US, he promised, would degrade and the destroy the terrorist group. Fortunately, he has the sense not to use American ground troops to achieve this. The question, though, is just who will do the ground pounding?

Mr. Obama offered a "counter-terrorism campaign ... waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground, ... [a] strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines." It is largely the same approach the US has used in Yemen and Somalia in recent years.

As the US has demonstrated in Iraq, air power makes all the difference. ISIS has been in retreat with the Kurdish peshmerga advancing steadily after US airstrikes. It allows for a 21st century blitzkrieg. ISIS, with no air assets at all, cannot fight back.

However, air power alone doesn't get the job done. Despite what Hermann Goering, Arthur Harris and Curtis LeMay believed, planes cannot hold territory. All they can do is destroy infrastructure, disrupt logistics and shatter formations of troops. In the end, one must have a 20-year-old with a rifle standing on the ground in order to control it. The peshmerga fighters are more than capable of filling that role. Where it gets tricky is when one looks at ISIS elsewhere, such as Syria.

Friendly ground forces are few and far between there. Moderate rebel troops fighting the Assad regime have not been terribly effective. The Assad regime, on the other hand, can do the job, but it is so repellent that one is loathe to rely on its forces. This is no time to be squeamish, though.

The US must take the fight to ISIS in Syria by air, says Mr. Obama, and if there is an alternative, one would love to hear it. The territory ISIS controls there will be up for grabs after an American airstrike. With a plethora of factions fighting over control of the country, relying on any one of them is taking a side in a civil war that America would best stay out of. The US is just going to have to accept the fact that disrupting and destroying ISIS may benefit people in Syria who are not the sort one would put up for membership at the Athenaeum.

During World War II, the forces of decency and civilization did a great many things that were neither decent nor civilized. Among them was arming Stalin against Hitler with the Lend-Lease program. Helping one bad guy to stop another bad guy is morally messy, but in the adult world, most moral questions come not in black and white but rather in varying shades of grey.

ISIS is clearly an awful mob of gangsters. The Assad regime is an awful mob of gangsters. The Assad gangsters, however, seem uninterested in killing large numbers of people outside Syria. The streets of New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Jakarta, Moscow and Cape Town are safe from the Assad machine. One cannot make the same statement about ISIS.

President Assad has warned that any air strike without his permission will be considered a hostile act. He's bluffing with a busted flush. If the US hits ISIS and he benefits from that strike, he won't complain in the least, except perhaps for Damascus TV and internal consumption. When ISIS is gone, the US can turn its attention to him, if he survives the conflict. For now, one must keep one's priorities straight and remember that moral rules are best kept off the battle field. Necessity, as Oliver Cromwell said, hath no law.

© Copyright 2014 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.



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