Another "Long War," Part 3

Obama seems finally to have united the nation, having come up with a plan for destroying ISIS which absolutely everyone thinks is utterly stupid. Since he announced it Wednesday, I have not read one single article in support of his plan, and have read dozens which slam it for various reasons ranging from the plan not being sufficiently violent to the fact that it exists at all.

Rosa Brooks punks Obama for violating his promise to avoid “dumb wars” and lists several reasons why this war is even more dumb than was George Bush’s Iraq war. The article is behind a pay wall which grants one free visit per month, I believe, so you might be able to read it. If not her reasons pretty much run along the lines of the ones I've posed earlier, with a couple of additions.

She points out that Obama’s “fatwa of jihad” against the Islamic State is a marvelous recruiting tool for them. Just as jihadists flocked to Afghanistan to throw Russia out of that Islamic homeland, they are surely going to flock to the Islamic State to throw the Great Satan out of the Islamic State desert. If there are 30,000 fighters there now, you can bet there will be 50,000 there in a year or two.

Part of Obama’s eleven dimensional plan is to prevent foreign fighters from joining the fray, of course, but good luck with that for several reasons. It’s not going to happen.

She also points out that Syria is a Russian client state and that bombing in that nation without its permission is not only a violation of its national sovereignty and of international law, but is fraught with a significant risk of bringing us into direct conflict with Russia, which has nuclear weapons and the capability of delivering them to every part of the United States.

I would add that it risks bringing us into direct conflict with Syria, but of course for Obama that is a feature, not a bug.

Obama does not acknowledge the concept of "national sovereignty," of course, and he is not concerned about Russia because he regards them as a “regional power” (apparently nuclear missiles don’t count) which is afraid of picking a fight with us because of our much larger military. He must not have been listening when General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the JSOC, told him that our military is currently so badly broken that it would “shatter” if Obama got us into another war.

Obama’s comments about Russia sound like the same arrogant schoolyard bullying that George Bush engaged in, except that he uses somewhat more refined language. The attitude, however, if you listen beneath the smoother words, is pretty much the same, as is the policy.

Obama admitted in his speech that ISIS does not currently present any threat to this nation, but that there is a chance that it might someday do so, albeit even then not particularly deadly threats, and that he is therefor launching military strikes against it in two countries. Preventive war against possible future threat. He was appalled when George Bush was doing this, but now that it is his turn to do it…

Someone posed the question, “Does this mean that we are going to be at endless war forever?” My reaction was that it was a remarkably silly question.