Time to Stop ISIS: It grew because it seemed unstoppable. Our air strikes have changed that.

National Review ^ | 08/22/2014 | Charles Krauthammer

[SeekAndFind]

Baghdad called President Obama’s bluff and he came through. He had refused to provide air support to Iraqi government forces until the Iraqis got rid of their divisive sectarian prime minister.

They did. He responded.

With the support of U.S. air strikes, Iraqi and Kurdish forces have retaken the Mosul dam. Previous strikes had relieved the siege of Mount Sinjar and helped the Kurds retake two strategic towns that had opened the road to a possible Islamic State assault on Irbil, the capital of Kurdistan.

In following through, Obama demonstrated three things: the effectiveness of even limited U.S. power, the vulnerability of the Islamic State, and, crucially, his own seriousness, however tentative.

The last of these is the most important. Obama had said that there was no American military solution to the conflict. This may be true, but there is a local military solution. And that solution requires U.S. air support.

It can work. The Islamic State is overstretched. It’s a thin force of perhaps 15,000 trying to control a territory four times the size of Israel. Its supply lines are not just extended but exposed and highly vulnerable to air power.

Stopping the Islamic State’s momentum creates a major shift in psychology. Guerrilla armies thrive on a sense of inevitability. The Islamic State has grown in size, demoralized its enemies, and attracted recruits from all over the world because it seemed unstoppable, a real caliphate in the making.

People follow the strong horse over the weak horse, taught Osama bin Laden. These jihadists came out of nowhere and shocked the world by capturing Mosul, Tikrit, and the approaches to Kurdistan, heretofore assumed to be impregnable.

Now that’s begun to be reversed.

[Travis McGee]

[Diogenesis]

The terrorists are being helped by some in the USA.

---

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious.
But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.
But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.
A murderer is less to be feared."
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

[iontheball]

Fat chance without boots on the ground. Ask any experienced military combat officer. The only way to rid the area of the vermin from the air is to drop a few ‘fat boys’ and eradicate everything.

[Travis McGee]

We could see game-changing events any moment, if IS already has a dozen or so operatives in the USA ready to follow orders.

[dfwgator]

Bullhockey.

[Travis McGee]

It’s a great quote, but sadly, Cicero never said or wrote it. I checked it in great detail, because I planned to use it in a book. It’s 100% certified bogus. Everything Cicero wrote is cataloged, and that isn’t close to anything he wrote or said.

“The problem with internet quotes is that many of them are false.”
~~Abraham Lincoln

[ReaganÜberAlles]

Napalm is our friend.

[DJ MacWoW]

Freepathon

Click The Pic To Donate

Donate And Finish The Job

[Bogey78O]

Had Obama wanted and tried to secure a Force agreement, ten thousand+ Iraqis would be alive today.

They’ve already committed their genocide, we’re just picking up the pieces.

[Shery]

This must be a delusional leftie writer. ISIS is stopped? WHAT FANTASY WORLD DOES THIS GUY LIVE IN? And we now have ISIS ready to come in at our southern border? Obama is antagonizing them so they will and he’s already left the gate unlocked for them. They’ll probably get voting rights within days of their arrival. Obama must be impeached while there still is an AMerica. Why will America NOT wake up? What is it going to take? A nuclear bombed city or two?

[Wyatt's Torch]

Can't be stopped without placing a large number of troops on the ground. They are too big:

[Wyatt's Torch]

This is Krauthamer... Delusional though.

[quantumman]

Krauthamer is a military thinker and strategist so he has given this some thought. I have read in other sources that ISIL is stretched thin which would include their supply/logistic arrangements. A tactical air campaign with Special Forces on the ground (a few more) painting targets, viz., the Mosul Dam, could work if Bammy would just let his Joint Chiefs do a little work.

[Old Teufel Hunden]

"Fat chance without boots on the ground."

Yes, you are correct. There needs to be boots on the ground, however it does not have to be American boots on the ground. The Peshmerga and a hopefully re-constituted Iraqi Army can be those boots on the ground. We should have been arming the Peshmerga right away because they are one of our truest allies in the region.

As the article states, ISIL's supply lines are stretched and do I have to state the obvious here. They're in a freakin' desert!! There's nowhere to hide so ISIL is in the open a lot of time and with correct on the ground intel (Peshmerga and Iraqi troops), we can hit large portions of ISIL in the open. We still need U.S. special forces troops as a rapid reaction force to be on the ground to rescue any downed pilots or to act on intel to take out top leaders of ISIL in towns and cities.

[Old Teufel Hunden]

"This must be a delusional leftie writer. ISIS is stopped?"

I think what Krauthammer is talking about is that their momentum is stopped. Which is true. They are not taking any new ground and have given up ground because the Mosul Damn has been retaken and some towns and cities in Kurdistan have been retaken.

In combat, when you're not on offense, you're on defense. They are now playing defense which is where we want them. Now we have to continue that. I don't want to see ISIL in America. We need to kill them off in their infancy over there. I support infanticide when it comes to ISIL!!