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I was flabbergasted to read this morning that we are “
I can’t say I really understand the complaint against the GOP candidates considering you think that something has to be done NOW, Claire. Correct me if I’m wrong but the only one in a position to do something about this is our current president. Anything the current GOP candidates say will be labeled political opportunism and an attempt to undermine our current leader. Tom Cotton got raked over the coals for weeks for simply taking out an ad in the NY Times.
The situation may well be on the verge of total collapse, but that is entirely the fault of our current president, and only he can do something about it. He’s not going to, Claire. You should accept that fact and not point fingers at people who can’t do a damn thing about it.
Seriously, that’s about what Bush tried to do in 2003 and it resulted in the insurgency of AQI. That was only stopped by the surge. Stability will only be maintained by a permanent presence of US forces. So until we are willing to commit to a generations long project like we are still engaged in with North and South Korea, sending in overwhelming force is a foolish idea.
This presupposes a Walter Russell Mead Jacksonian foreign policy stance that the US has not had since Andrew Jackson. We didn’t turn Riyadh into a glass parking lot after 9/11, so what makes you think we’re going to do it wherever ISIS is today?
For what it’s worth, though, this is my philosophy of war: you don’t react with force to provocation. You inform the aggressors that the third act will result in horrifying reprisals from one of the world’s nuclear powers. If they don’t take the hint, after the third time, it’s straight to the nukes, do not pass go, etc. The point being to have that generation’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren’s knees turn to water anytime anyone’s stupid enough to suggest harming the US as anything other than sick gallows humor.
Short of that, we leave the world alone. Avoid foreign entanglements, remember? Defend our borders and skies. Put much of the current military budget into missile defense. Yep, I’m talking about Fortress America, but retaining overwhelming offensive force for responding when we are attacked.
Attacking the US is suicide.
That needs to be the foregone conclusion of everyone in the world. The only thing preventing it from being is our lack of will.
Was he out of line in saying this?
Does our country deserve less?
Seems like common sense to me.
–C. Jackson Berlinski
Claire,
No matter what the training or equipment if an army is led poorly it will fail. You are grasping completely just how bad BHO is as Commander in Chief.
If the Republicans are to attack him they must do so in a coherent and specific manner that makes it clear just how incompetent he is.
I was on this specific line recently when we finally got down to the “rules of engagement” for our airstrikes. This is critical in ground support as long delays between knowing a target needs hit and being allowed to hit it are disastrous on a real active battlefield.
Please watch video
Micromanaging hampering US mission on ISIS
Bound up with this is the choice of weapons. On an active battlefield against fluid small group actors like ISIS a low flying slow aircraft that can repeatedly hit the enemy as it circles & circles over the battlefield is far more effective than pre-called stikes by Mach II air superiority fighters launched from an aircraft carrier.
Please reread my post.
ONLY THE A10 CAN DO THIS JOB: CLOSE AIR SUPPORT OF GROUND TROOPS
The issue of the “rules of engagement” should have been taken up by some of the leading young Republican presidential hopefuls. This issue would clarify the fools non-strategy of BHO. It would give Ash Carter something to work with.
By maximizing the effectiveness of our air power and coordinating it with the local ground troops we could drive ISIS out and give them stinging defeats. That is what happened with the Peshmerga. They are back in trouble because the situation is once again taken for granted by the idiot at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Regards,
Jim
I totally agree. For the love of God, all we have heard is how hard it is to fight a guerrilla war against an unorganized force of civilians. At this point it is an organized force fighting under a flag. We are good at this [edited for CoC, although this editor agrees with the sentiment]. Crush them and leave. As for the Kurds, give them whatever they need, at least they will fight….
We have arranged for the Quds Force to protect them
That would be awesome, but it is still beside the point. Not even Churchill could wake up Great Britain before it was too late, do you think we have anyone on the GOP side that is better than Churchill?
The point stands, only Obama can do something about it and the GOP has no leverage on him to force him to act. Obama has no intention of doing anything. And unless we are ready and willing to make a generations long commitment to keep troops in Anbar, there is no point in sending in more troops as short term solutions.
I don’t really think the Republicans have been silent on this. I hope the serious contenders area able to give some specifics on what they think the right course of action is soon though. I sometimes feel like the only person in the country that thinks foreign policy is the most important thing to look at in a presidential candidate. Nothing Obama has done has dissuaded me of that opinion however. I don’t give a rat’s ass what they think about transgender issues or really drug legalization. This [edited] is more important.
There are at least two of us.
I agree.
No, I don’t, but that’s my complaint. And I don’t see why we find it so natural that this should be so.
What we understand is what our Congress and White House can get their minds around. Then once we’re in place and doing lots of stuff, what the inter agency task forces and Congress can get their minds around as they constrain themselves for posturing and photo ops, and what folks on the ground, only a few of whom will speak the language, can do in spite of always inept interest and photo op driven instructions and way too much money to spend. We can do really big lumpy things; Like invade and kill them. It’s the then what that’s the problem. It would be hard enough with adults running things, but without a leader who has a solid vision, the will to clear away all the political rubbish, who knows what he’s doing, is credible abroad and at home, it is well beyond us. At best that is almost two years away.
I’m not so sure that’s true:
http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/03/08/iraq-opinion-polls/24276663/
And anyway, it doesn’t matter. We don’t run wars by popular dictate. That’s why the president is commander-in-chief. The problem is not that the public may or may not want to send troops to Iraq, but that the current president doesn’t want to send troops to Iraq. (Really, the problem is that we have a public that elected Obama twice–you can’t really blame Obama for being Obama.)
You don’t understand why we find it natural that we don’t have a once in a century leader and genius rhetorician ready to step up at any given time we need them? That is really what you don’t get?
The GOP candidates aren’t speaking out about our lack of response to ISIS because the American people don’t want to respond to ISIS.
That is the way things are now.
Why aren’t the GOP presidential candidates screaming about this?
And do what with the screaming? We’re going to have to wait for another year and a half before we can change this, whether we want to or not. Congress can effect the purse strings–and it should–but it cannot put a strategy into Obama’s hands and make him use it.
For now, it’s enough to let these things speak for themselves. And this from Bloomberg, no less.
There’s plenty of time to take the thing up when the campaigns get rolling, after HRC gets her nomination. Then, in addition to her sleeping through her own 3 am call, it’ll be useful to talk about her own lack of strategy in support of her mentor’s lack.
Screaming now, whether in hysteria or anger will only deprecate the screamer.
Eric Hines
Don’t these numbers have something to do with the size of the enemy belligerent forces?
In the Iraq war it was over a 500,000.
ISIS is about 30,000?
No, I do not. We are the United States of America.
I beg you Claire. No more Updates. Well . . . at least until I find that bottle of bourbon stowed in the back of the pantry.
Well, Claire, if you look at our history, our greatest leaders have only ever emerged after a crisis has taken full bloom. Until American’s are dying and the threat comes home, you will not see the type of leadership you are pining for. We never have.
I would only add that we talk about Churchill because there was another time in our past when we had a rising threat that almost no one was interested in.
With respect to Obama in particular, doing enough is an admission of error and I don’t think he has it in him to admit it, at the cost of any consequences.
Regarding that Bloomberg link, it just merely emphasizes my question to Claire regarding the USA’s ability to bigfoot its way in world affairs these days.
Don’t worry, a car will do. We’re making a strong effort to increase the number of Syrian refugees we admit to the US.
And just that mere fact insulates the USA from any limits regarding when to send soldiers and Marines?
I think that your view is historically inaccurate. The Nazis were a major threat. If they had taken out the UK — which was a close-run thing in 1940 and 1941 — they could have picked up the British fleet and added it to the Japanese, French, Italian, and of course their own fleet. It would have been very difficult for the US to defeat that combination of sea power in 1942 or 1943.
Technically, I agree that an invasion of New York remained unlikely. But the geopolitical picture would have been completely altered, and we would have faced a triumphant Hitler and Tojo with overwhelming sea power. Yikes.
A Soviet invasion was also unlikely, even putting aside the existence of nukes by the time that the Soviets became a threat. The issue was geopolitical domination, and they were a major threat if the combination of NATO and American nukes hadn’t kept them out of Western Europe.
No, it suggests to me that we should be more than able to give rise to great leadership.
What if the rest of the world is perfectly OK with the US “leading from behind” (in that nasty Obama vernacular)?
On reading these words I recalled a fragment of a sentence that is well known to those of us of a certain age: “Ask Amy”.
The survivors of the Carter Presidency know what I am talking about.
Politically:
I see no reasonable prospect that Obama will do anything useful about ISIS. He’s not going to suddenly become Churchill, or even Bush ’43. While Obama remains in office, I do not see any reasonable prospect that any Republican or group of Republicans will change this.
I see no political advantage, at present, for any Republican candidate to take a firm stand regarding any particular action against ISIS at the present time. Whatever they may recommend will not be done, so the usefulness of any suggestions will remain hypothetical. If the ISIS situation becomes much worse, any Republican candidate will benefit in the general election next year, regardless of what he or she says now. If the ISIS situation doesn’t look too bad next year, then anything that a Republican candidate said in mid-2015 will look like overreaction.
As much as I’d like to see the US military crush these ISIS savages, in the big picture, ISIS does not appear to be much of a threat to the US or its vital interests. They are not going to topple the Saudis or the Iranians. The oil will continue to flow. There don’t seem to be any real “good guys” in the region anyway, so it’s hard to see who we should back.
Obama’s negotiations with Iran are, in my view, much more important than ISIS.