http://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/world...with-only-34-bases-left/ar-BBnoOcI?li=AAaeXZz
So what exactly have we been bombing for the last year? In two weeks Russia and France have ISIS on the "brink of defeat"?
We'll see how much this actually does. You can't bomb jihad.
Probably just sets everything back a year and we will have to deal with it all over again.
Some thoughts:
1. The Bombing Campaign is a Dog and Pony Show
Our bombing campaign against Daesh has been more or less window-dressing from the beginning. As
@The Human Q-Tip, and others, have noted that senior military leaders, some of whom I have chatted with, for some time have been saying that the ROE is so restrictive that the vast majority of sorties do not drop ordinance. That in itself can be excused by collateral damage considerations, however, the same leaders, and now those at the Pentagon and CIA seem to be alluding to the fact that
target selection is wanting and the campaign is not designed and not executed in a manner to actually cripple ISIS on the battlefield. That we have not targeted Daesh's oil export operations until very recently is a prime demonstration of either extreme incompetence by the Administration or a lack of interest in real results.
2. Obama Wants Assad Defeated Even at the Expense of Fighting ISIS
I generally don't like to give credit to right-wing warnings of Obama's evil designs, and even
@gourimoko will attest to his ineptitude on foreign affairs, but too much information has come out from multiple sources, including Leon Fucking Penatta yesterday, that Obama not only dismissed warnings not to arm certain fundamentalist Syrian opposition groups because their goal was to establish a "Caliphate" (direct warning using that term), but continued to ignore ISIS in its growth phase, and even after it conquered vast swathes of Syrian territory, because he felt they were too valuable in the fight against Assad. Moreover, it has been said by many now, that
the bombing-campaign has been so ineffective exactly because Obama sees Assad as the primary threat rather than Daesh. Obama continued arms shipments to groups even when he was warned that the weapons were likely to fall into ISIS' hands.
Obama's own recent statements support this position insofar as even after the Paris attacks, he continues to insist that Assad is the primary enemy and refuses to cooperate with Russia because of their support of the Ba'athist regime.
If he truly felt ISIS was the real enemy he would have set aside his quixotic fantasy in toppling Assad when reality (and his advisors saying so) rendered that goal infeasible a couple years ago. One is beginning to see why Obama has gone through so many SecDefs.
3. France's Grand Coalition Against Daesh May be Boned
On one hand, they have an ally in the US that isn't too interested in offering concrete support against ISIS beyond its own pre-existing farce of an air campaign, and on the other, Russia who is as interested in hitting all rebel groups that oppose Assad as much as fighting ISIS. Add to that the Turks who not only hit Russia harder than they probably should have, but have actively been supporting ISIS and now is even more entrenched in that position. France is fucked. The pre-existing conditions necessary for the coalition to function in unison against ISIS are not present.
For anything to go forward, Russia and the US must come to an agreement about the future of Syria that includes Assad in power for at least a transitional period. With Obama in denial about a "Moderate Syrian Opposition," and seemingly out of touch with reality regarding the ISIS threat from the beginning, France may just have to work with Russia alone if anything is to get done.
4. A Turkish Article 5 Invocation Would be Interesting
It won't happen, but would anyone care to guess how many NATO nations wouldn't support Turkey in the event of Article 5 if Russia retaliated? Certainly Greece wouldn't and I think several slavic nations would sit this one out. I for one think Erdogan's behavior lately, regarding the Kurds and his tacit support of ISIS
(by my calculation around 20,000 oil trucks a year are trundling into Turkey from ISIS controlled territory, how do they miss that?), has perhaps led some people, like myself, into thinking it wouldn't be the worst thing to see them hoisted by their own petard. I'm not saying that Russia is the victim here, or that maybe they didn't deserve to have a plane shot down after all the incursions the past few years. However, as
@jking948 can attest to in his studies, the Turks have been behaving like bastards for the past decade as well and used the last crisis in consulting NATO as an excuse to attack the Kurds.
In any event,
downing that Russian jet probably had as much to do, or more, about the Turks trying to defend the ethnic Turks on the Syrian border, and maintaining their unilateral buffer-zone over the ten-mile stretch of the Syrian/Turkish border as the actual territorial violation. The Russians have been hammering them lately, and the Turks warned them last week about it. Of course, it matters not to the Turks that some of those rebels are also hard-core Islamists in their own right.
Destroying that rescue helicopter and executing the downed pilots, however, may have been going too far.
The Turks support those groups and, by implication, they are culpable in the deaths of those Russian servicemen. That is worse than the downing of the Su-24 and Putin will have to retaliate violently, probably against the Syrian Turcomen rebels.
What a fucking mess.