Posted on 05/27/2015 6:55:37 PM PDT by Hojczyk
The fall of Baghdad to ISIS would harm American strategic interests as the fall of Saigon did in 1975. The blow to U.S. credibility and the enhancement of ISIS’s prestige, of its black flag rising over an evacuated U.S. Embassy, would be incalculable. To prevent this outcome, President Obama should consider taking the following actions.
• Use strategic air power. America’s unrivaled air forces can hit ISIS from anywhere: neighboring countries, the sea and the continental U.S. Yet the sorties flown so far have been minimal, and damage inflicted still less,even as ISIS held a parade in broad daylight in Rutba, Iraq, last week.
• Launch ruthless special operations. Recent raids into Syria were daring and skillful. But a handful of missions do not resemble the operations led by U.S. Army Gens. Stanley McChrystal and Michael Flynn in 2006-07 that eventually broke the back of ISIS’s predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq, and drove it abroad.
• Capture and interrogate ISIS leaders. Much of the intelligence exploited on those missions came from documents and electronics found in terrorist safe houses. But the best came from interrogations, some conducted on the battlefield as the smoke cleared.
• Send ground combat forces.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
While I agree with the authors premise. With OBOZO in charge this will never happen. His side is winning and his side is not AMERICA’S side
Freegards
LEX
Easy. Replace the American Government with one not interested in building the Caliphate.
“Use strategic air power. Send ground combat forces.”
Duh. Of course our cuurent CIC has to be told this.
Obama couldn’t care less. Iraq in chaos just further vilifies Bush, as the Left blames everything on him.
In some way, they’d probably enjoy seeing Baghdad fall.
With a communist traitor in the Red House, who wishes for a crippled America, why would you think he would do anything, esp. now?
He is ISIS’s best friend in DC.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Purple trigger fingers BUMP!
“He is ISIS in DC.”
you had two extra words in there. I fixed it for you.
Baghdad will fall...to Iran.
Isn’t having airplanes fly around without giving them permission to hit any targets enough? That should show those mean ISIS folks we mean business!
Bammy would need to renounce Islam. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
The clear strategic objective is, as it was in 2003, to prevent the control of national assets to fall into the hands of violent militants who will use them against Americans. As before, those national assets may or may not include chemical and nuclear weapons at the moment, but in time they will. I stated then that the best we might expect out of Bush's intervention was to buy us time, rather more time, I hoped, than we actually got courtesy of his successor's malign and incompetent meddling. But the strategic situation has changed since then. A threat to the Saudi wells is no longer an existential threat to the world economy; it's a dangerous one, to be sure, but not what we faced in '03 and definitely not what we faced in '91. That changes what ISIS can and cannot do despite all the chest-pounding about smuggling nukes into New York. That's fluff for the cameras; they're not ready for that yet because they're not ready to follow it up. In time they may be.
On the other side of this coin, if we take ground we're going to have to hold it, because the Iraqis don't seem to want to. Nor, actually, does any sober American strategist. What Bush found out was that yes, you can build a nation if you're prepared to prop it up indefinitely. If not, not.
In the north we have the Kurds who have proven that they can both take and hold territory, but at whom the Turks look at askance because they claim what the Turks call their own. That is a diplomatic challenge, not a military one. In the east, the Iranians who are having the usual ethnic and sectarian problems moving west. Nuclear weapons won't help that. In the south, the Saudis will be nuclear themselves very soon if they aren't already. In the far west, we have incessant warfare from the Golan Heights to Yemen.
What we do not have is either the means or the determination to straighten this mess out, if that is even possible. Five millennia of recorded history suggest that it might not be. My humble suggestion is for us to do what we have the means to succeed at: strengthen the periphery in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey should that country decide it prefers to be part of the solution instead of, as at present, part of the problem. I wouldn't bet on the latter. As for the rest, I don't think you can really stop people from fighting who want to.
Ha! Those guys even have Barry dressed in the ‘traditional’ muzzie/islam green suit, much like Hillary’s green outfit in her, “what difference does it make’ hearing”.
I’m conflicted.
On the one hand, the insane people busily killing each other off “over there” is a plus in lowering the threat of insane people traveling from there, and killing us over here.
OTOH, I’m not at all happy about all the killings.
Since it really doesn’t appear possible to stop the insane people from killing each other, it might be best to just let them have at it, and not interfere, except to keep them far away from the rest of humanity.
If people think we, as in the USA, must get involved, we could aid the Kurds, kick out..er persuade the EU nations and the UN to not interfere, toss Turkey out of NATO, and let China/Russia/India send in ground forces to “help”.
We were typing at the same time...you are the better writer.
Bagdad has fallen many, many times. It’s been sacked and re-sacked over and over.
But I guess more of our people have to die over there for us to save face. I hope all our military personnel read this article and see what they are being asked to die for.
Many thanks. From you, that’s saying something. :-)
Baghdad is not going to fall. The Shia militias will fight tooth and nail and Iran will help them. The are willing to give up places like Ramadi, which are Sunni, but Baghdad is theirs.
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