Topic: Decline of the West
You may or may not agree with President Obama’s decision to make war on ISIS, the Islamofascist group that has conquered large portions of Syria and Iraq. One thing that all reasonable people can agree on, though, is that airpower alone can’t do the job. If the President is serious about defeating ISIS, he must sooner or later commit US ground troops in a combat role.
Whether he really is serious about ISIS is doubtful. Obama’s tone and body language give the impression of a man afflicted with chagrin and embarrassment. Having unilaterally declared that the war on terror was over and done with—his own version of George W. Bush’s much-derided “mission accomplished” moment— the President is obviously not pleased to be facing this new crisis. When Barry bugged out of Iraq his vice president, the inimitable Joe Biden, crowed that Iraq would be remembered as the Obama Administration’s greatest foreign policy triumph. When Obama agonized over Syria, his claque produced long lists of reasons why doing nothing was the smart call. But now—better late than never!—the President realizes that something must be done. But what that something is remains obscure. He’s sure of one thing though: No US boots on the ground!
And that’s the problem. If Obama really means what he says—that no US ground troops will be committed to the fight against ISIS—then he’s not serious about defeating ISIS. Air strikes can harass the enemy, break up troop concentrations, destroy installations and equipment, degrade communications. But they cannot, in and of themselves, roll back the ISIS tide or eject ISIS from the broad swaths of territory it now controls. Only ground troops can do that and the President’s idea that such troops can be provided by “regional partners”—variously the moderate Syrian opposition, the Kurds, the Iraqi Army, other Arab states—is wishful thinking.
The Iraqi Army, poorly trained and badly led, has already been soundly beaten by ISIS. The Kurds seem capable of defending their own turf but have little capacity and, probably, little interest in taking the offensive against ISIS. The so-called moderate Syrian opposition was in the recent past derided by the same Obama Administration that appeals to it now. Other Arab may wish to intervene against ISIS but their military capabilities are strictly limited, particularly as regards logistics, and their ability to deploy large forces to Iraq is doubtful. Only the United States can supply the ground force necessary to rally those faltering regional partners and win the war.
It need not be a large force. The intervention of a single US combat brigade, buttressed by special operations units and powerfully supported from the air, would provide the margin of superiority necessary to eject ISIS from Iraq. Syria, disjointed by civil war, is a more difficult problem. In the end it will probably be necessary to prop up the hateful Assad regime, a gloomy prospect for which we have Obama’s dithering to thank. But as bad as Assad and his henchmen are, ISIS is worse.
So here we are and it's time for Barack Obama to make up his mind. Either he’s serious about defeating ISIS or he isn’t. Either he does what’s necessary to win or he folds his hand. Half-measures in the form of air strikes micromanaged by the White House won’t cut it and, indeed, are likely to make a bad situation worse.
