So President Obama, in the wake of the home-grown terrorist attack in San Bernardino, goes on TV to explain his ISIS strategy and to urge calm, and the entire right rejects him out of hand, saying he’s weak, doesn’t have a strategy, loves Muslims, and hates America. One of Fox News’ military “experts” calls him a total pussy. Why? Because he didn’t announce he was going all out against ISIS?
After the terrorist attack in Paris, I said Obama needed to do something decisive about ISIS, lest the widespread (yet totally false) perception that Democrats are weak on defense cost Hillary or Bernie the 2016 election. What I had in mind was taking the gloves off in the air campaign against ISIS. I now think I was being not only simple-minded, but pointlessly bloody-minded as well.
The president’s opponents (and much of the media) pretend not to know that for the past 15 months a coalition of nations, led by the USA, has been bombing ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria. As of three days ago, the coalition has carried out 8,556 airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Three quarters of those strikes have been flown by US forces, and to date the US Air Force alone has dropped 22,000 munitions on ISIS targets. In the last two or three days, we may indeed have stepped up these attacks, but information on that is not yet firm. Russia, which recently entered the arena, is not part of the coalition, and I don’t know how many sorties they’ve flown or how many munitions they’ve dropped.
For months now, scuttlebutt from frustrated American aircrews has been leaking to the media, as in these stories of American fighter/bombers returning to bases and aircraft carriers with unexpended ordnance, unable to get clearance to attack ISIS targets. As in Vietnam, authority to engage enemy forces has been taken from local commanders and kicked up the chain, perhaps in some cases all the way to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense, if not the Commander-in-Chief himself. Shades of LBJ, right?
Why is it so hard to get clearance to attack ISIS targets? Because ISIS deliberately swims in a sea of civilians, and experience has taught us that killing non-combatants only makes more enemies.
But what if Obama said fuck it, Syrians and Iraqis have had plenty of time to root these ISIS bastards out, and if they’re not gonna do it why don’t we drop warning leaflets Thursday and then level ISIS-occupied cities Friday, civilian casualties be damned? That, I’m ashamed to say, is what I had in mind after the Paris attacks.
And then I remembered something. Today’s frustrated aircrews are a lot like the frustrated American fighter jocks who couldn’t attack certain targets in Vietnam because LBJ and Bob McNamara and General Westmoreland kept interfering with the rules of engagement. But that wasn’t always the case in Vietnam: at certain points in the war both LBJ and Nixon lifted restrictions and our aircrews were allowed to bomb the ever-lovin’ shit out of North Vietnam. And what happened after all those Rolling Thunder and Arc Light missions? Right … Ho Chi Minh won the war anyway.
There’s a lesson there, and I think President Obama has that lesson in mind. No, I don’t know what he should do, but I’m glad he didn’t do what I initially wanted him to do, because it would backfire on us for generations to come, just as the pointless war George W. Bush started in Iraq is backfiring on us now.
Criticism of Obama is agenda-driven (that agenda being total opposition to anything a a black Democrat president does) and would be just as nasty no matter what he did. Killing Osama bin Laden? Total pussy. Busting up dozens of planned terrorist plots against American targets? Total pussy. Preventing a repeat of 9/11? Total pussy. Bombing ISIS? Total pussy. Ah, but if Putin drops a few bombs on ISIS, more than a year after Obama started doing it, he’s a real man, right?
I’m proud of my president and thankful he knows how to keep his head when all about him are losing theirs.
There you go quoting Kiping. Obama needs to spend more time with his shirt off so he can out Putin, Putin. I can remember the old, “bombing them back into the stone age” idea that was supposed to work on North Vietnam, wrong. Same thing with ISIS the only thing that draconian measures does is create sympathizers. When they start talking about dead mothers and children all but the most hardcore are going to start talking about collateral damage. Obama is between a rock and a hard place aside from, I think, his personality favoring being non-confrontational. The “nuke ’em all” bunch are like a dog that can bark and lunge because it knows it’s safe on a leash.