Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Do you believe the military knows best how to defeat ISIS?

◼ BREAKING: Stunning That Top US Military Officer Just Shot Down Obama's Own ISIS Strategy
There have been numerous news reports over the last week — including several posts here at Western Journalism — strongly indicating that the Obama administration does not have a consistent, coherent policy for combating the Islamic State. What just happened in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee will only serve to reinforce that perception of confusion within the ranks of Obama’s top officials.

Fox News reports that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs — America’s top military leader — has raised the distinct possiblity of U.S. “boots on the ground” in the expanding fight against ISIS in the Middle East.

In testimony before Congress, Gen. Martin Dempsey seemed to contradict — or at the very least to undermine — what the Command-in-Chief, his boss, Barack Obama — has consistently promised.
◼ Richard Engel: The White House is delusional if they think we’re not going to be acting as Assad’s air force - HotAir
Via the Corner, I made the same point myself on Friday. Once you’ve stopped ISIS’s advance from the air and they hunker down in the cities they control, what then? Who’s going in after them? In Iraq, presumably, it’ll be the Iraqi army and the peshmerga, although I don’t know why the latter would care about territory outside Kurdistan and I don’t know how effective the former is even if the desire is there. In Syria it’s even murkier. We’re not sending in American infantry to be sniped at in the streets of Raqqa. The Saudis and Jordanians might do it, I suppose, but Arab monarchies prefer to have White House suckers do their fighting for them, especially on the ground. (“We don’t want this to look like an American war,” a U.S. official told the NYT, which is grimly hilarious given that these always, always end up being “American wars.”) The “moderate” Syrian rebels could do it except that (a) they, er, just declared a truce with ISIS in Syria, which is a teensy bit inconvenient for the White House’s “arm the moderates” narrative, and (b) apart from crazed superhawks like McCain and Lindsey Graham, literally no one thinks the “moderates” will be reliable or effective. Right? Point me to one impartial Syria expert who thinks somewhat-less-fanatic Syrian Sunnis are the rabbit waiting to be pulled out of Uncle Sam’s star-spangled top hat.


◼ NBC’s Richard Engel: Military Commanders ‘Apoplectic’ Over Obama’s ‘No Strategy’ Remarks [VIDEO] - Daily Caller
NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel claimed military commanders are “apoplectic” over President Barack Obama’s dithering on ISIS and admission that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to deal with them.

Engel spoke Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” where he was asked by Andrea Mitchell about the “president’s reluctance to take the fight against ISIS to Syria.”

“Well, I spoke to military commanders, I speak to former officials, and they are apoplectic,” he explained. “The think that this is a clear and present danger. They think something needs to be done.”
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