Wierd War

Glenn Greenwald has an article claiming that Obama’s newest terrorist threat, the “Khorasan network” which was bombed in Syria this week, is entirely fictional; something which the Obama administration made up to justify the air strikes against ISIS in Syria. His offers of proof strike me as more suggestive than probative, surprisingly so given that he is an attorney, but you can read his piece and decide for yourself.

I’m sympathetic to his argument, though, because when CBS Evening News first aired the dramatic expose of this dreaded new threat my first reaction was to think that it was certainly convenient in terms of timing. Just when Obama wants to start dropping bombs in Syria a deadly new terrorist threat turns up in, of all places, Syria.

Adding to my skepticism was that this new terror cell was hit with “eight air strikes,” which seemed like serious overkill for a bunch we are being told had been unknown only a few months ago. Even more bizarre was the claim that the strikes had hit, “training camps, an explosives and munitions production facility, a communications building and command and control facilities.” This is a terror cell that we only discovered a few months ago?

The “explosives and munitions production facility” alone struck me as a bit much. An “explosives factory” I would have bought pretty readily, since drug gangs certainly have “drug factories” and explosives are to terrorists what drug are to gangs, but “munitions” in those factories as well? And what kind of terrorist cell has a “communications building,” let alone "command and control" facilities? I might have bought that we were bombing a new terrorist group, but the detailed description of precisely what we bombed clearly comes under the heading of “making shit up,” and casts a certain patina of doubt on the whole story. Sort of the Obama administration’s version of the Jessica Lynch rescue tale.

Adding to the doubt is that after the initial air strikes the “Khorasan network” has utterly and completely disappeared from the media blather.

This whole air war becomes more and more bizarre as time goes on. The battle is being desperately fought between good guys and bad guys, with the good guys begging for close air support, and we are bombing oil refineries. Really? And then it turns out we are bombing the wrong oil refineries, because the ones we bombed didn’t belong to ISIS after all. Why does that not surprise me?

Then we hear that our air forces have flown 4100 sorties, and have made 224 air strikes. Some of those sorties were refueling missions, but assuming that half of them were (which would be pathetic in itself), that means that 1826 odd times a fighter/bomber took off and flew around without doing anything; only about 10% of the missions made actual strikes. And we’re told that after just over a week, the air war against ISIS has already cost $1 billion.

That means that each air strike cost $4,464,285.75