Re: On ‘Face the Nation,’ Senators Feinstein, McCain Call For More U.S. Troops In M.E
Good morning Rocket
I tend to agree with your take here. Even more so than in Afghanistan, it is virtually impossible from a distance to tell who is the enemy in the battle with ISIS. It's one thing to be able to bomb ISIS encampments outside of cities and feel pretty safe that you're only hitting enemy positions. But in cities that have been overrun by ISIS combatants, who have terrorized residence into support or death, and when an ISIS combatant can look identical to a friendly, it's virtually impossible for an outside army on the ground to take the battle to them. It will take Iraqis themselves, those who know who is friendly and who isn't, to weed out the enemy and US troops pushing forward on the ground are likely to suffer serious casualties unless they're prepared to annihilate friendlies along with the enemy in a torched earth offensive.
The U.S. cannot afford to let jihadist war criminals who are our sworn enemies shelter among civilian populations. I do not believe a few thousand jihadists can have terrorized several hundred thousand or even a million "friendly" people in a city into supporting them. A much more likely explanation is that a good part of the population of cities like Raqqa and Mosul and Ramadi sides with them, more or less.
Since even before 9/11, both the U.S. government and many people here and in the West have been determined to deny the fact that a great many people in the Arab world--the masses so many Americans comfort themselves by thinking of as good, friendly Muslims--feel some sympathy with jihad. That willful blindness often shows itself as the claim that jihadism is a perversion of true Islam.
But the fact people who say this are desperate to deny is that many of the horrors the jihadists engage in are authorized by the most orthodox Islamic texts. Anyone who doubts that should look through [/I]Reliance of the Traveler,[/I] the 14th century text that is as authoritative and detailed a statement of the rules of shari'ah as there is. It may not specifically call for two men accused of homosexual acts to be pushed off a tall building in Mosul, as was done the other day--but it calls for them to be put to death just the same.
I recently read that a journalist who had spent time among the jihadists operating in Syria and Iraq reported that they hoped to kill
hundreds of millions of unbelievers. Fanatics like that cannot be reasoned with, or allowed to survive and grow in power. Every day they seem to be succeeding, the prestige of the U.S. suffers, and their ability to recruit followers increases. Mr. Obama's half-measures have saved Baghdad from being overrun--but that's about it. A couple carrier-based jets patrol here or there over Iraq, occasionally dropping a bomb or firing a missile, or now and then a drone destroys someone's car, or a cruise missile blows up some structure--and those pinpricks are sold as making war on the enemy.
In Syria, these people have gotten even stronger since the U.S. first bombed them late last summer. This administration's weak and haphazard foreign policy has allowed Libya to devolve into a failed state and hotbed of Islamic jihad--another Somalia. It is only
despite Mr. Obama's efforts that Gen. Sisi now rules in Egypt, and Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Obama favored, is gone. Thanks to his disastrous policy, U.S. influence in Yemen--a very important theater in the war against Islamic jihadists--apparently has now been lost. If not for the efforts of Chad and Cameroon, jihadists would be expanding their influence in Nigeria even further. And in the background, the greatest threat of all to this country continues to grow, as Iran keeps moving steadily toward manufacturing nuclear weapons.
