Taking Out ISIS is Simple, and Complicated.

Vincent J. Curtis

4 September 2014

When even Libertarian-ish Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) is changing his mind about intervention in Iraq against ISIS, you know something is up.  Emotions are running high, and President Obama’s apparent indifference and lackadaisical attitude is not calming the waters.  After the beheading by an ISIS thug of a second American journalist and fear mongering about ISIS attacks in homeland America, there is a powerful emotional wave demanding something be done about ISIS.

President Obama has been widely criticized by both Republicans and leading Democrats over his remark that he has no strategy as yet for dealing with ISIS.  President Obama in the same press conference in Estonia said that ISIS would be destroyed and reduced to manageable proportions.  Well, critics say, which is it?

As a technical matter, the elimination of ISIS is a simple thing to formulate.  But, as military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz wrote, in war the simple things are always hard.  The elimination of ISIS involves questions that none of President Obama’s critics have thought much about.

First, the elimination of ISIS.  The ISIS force in Iraq consists of somewhere between six and ten thousand men who are loosely strung along the network of roads leading from the Syrian border down to Fallujah and north of Baghdad.  The network is only strong if pushed northward from Baghdad back to Syria.  It would be easier to cut the network in half by a seizure of land north of Mosul from Iraqi Kurdistan to the Jordanian border, severing ISIS communications south of that seizure.  Either during or immediately after communications were cut, ISIS would be brought to a major battle.  Between competent land forces defending the seized land and U.S. air power, the ISIS forces attempting to break out of southern Iraq would be annihilated.  The loss of a large proportion of their force and the humiliating loss of territory would be morale shaking, and a lot of the foreign fighters would head for home, further accelerating the decline of ISIS.

So far, so good.  But here is where it gets complicated.

To completely eliminate ISIS, the land force which destroyed ISIS in battle would have to invade Syrian territory to clean out the remainder.  In clearing out the rest of ISIS, the force would solve a major problem for embattled Syrian President Bashir al-Assad. ISIS is one of the major forces seeking to overthrow the Assad regime. Assad is the fellow that last year President Obama said had to go; and now the United States would be saving his hide.  Putin would surely enjoy the irony of it all.  The Mullahs of Iran would be astonished at the strange but satisfying workings of Allah.

The position of leader gives a perspective on things which few except other leaders can appreciate.  It is easy for critics to say what ought to be done, when they are not the ones who have to do it.  There are further complicating things besides saving Assad which critics of inaction have not addressed.

The first thing President Obama’s critics have not answered is, why should the President of the United States save the people of Iraq from themselves?

The elimination of ISIS is going to involve a lot of bloodshed.  Are the critics prepared for the kind of brutality and bloodshed which annihilating ISIS will involve, or will they blanch at the horror?  I use the term “annihilate” in its technical sense to name the fate of ISIS forces.  That term means that practically every last one of the ISIS fighters is killed.  Prisoners will not be taken; or if taken, they will be killed in the same manner as ISIS killed their prisoners.  That brutality is all ISIS understands. But are Obama’s critics prepared to order that this be done?  There is going to be someone who observes that there seems to be little difference in method between ISIS and American backed forces.  How are Obama’s critics going to answer that charge?

Otherwise, do critics think that some prison system somewhere is going to hold, protect, and look after the majority of the ISIS thugs, those who surrendered?

There is simple talk that striking at the head of the snake in Syria would be sufficient to deal a death blow to ISIS.  Even if that did work, nothing is proposed to be done with the body of the snake, which comprises all those individuals who committed the blackest of human crimes.  What is supposed to be done with them?

If lawmakers want a blow to be struck at ISIS, they could start by passing a law declaring ISIS to be an outlaw organization, and that membership in ISIS or aiding and abetting ISIS is a criminal offense punishable a minimum of twenty years in prison.  It was made a criminal offense to have belonged to the German SS, and lawmakers can do a similar thing now.  Thus all those foreigners who served ISIS and escaped death on the battlefield could be imprisoned under domestic law.

ISIS is a threat to countries in the Middle East.  They are a threat to the existing Islamic order, and particularly the Arabic Islamic order.  Their empty threats against homeland America are meant for Middle Eastern consumption.  There is no particular urgency for the United States to save Iraqi Arabs from their own kind.  America has something of an obligation to protect the Kurds, who, while Islamic, are not Arabs, and are immune from pan-Arabic Islamic radicalism.

The beheading of two Americans by ISIS thugs has raised demands that ISIS be destroyed.  Rather than take measures within their own competence to do, lawmakers are busy saying what the President should do without addressing all the complicating issues.  The president’s go-slow policy is sensible in view of all the complicating factors.

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ISIS: Still a JV Team

Vincent J. Curtis 

11 August 2014

When he was first asked about the danger posed by ISIS, President Obama described them as a Junior Varsity team, and said that a JV team putting on the sweaters of the Los Angeles Lakers did not turn them into Kobe Bryant, the Lakers’s star player.  With the success of ISIS since those comments were made, the JV remarks are being thrown back at President Obama by his panicking critics.  Nevertheless, those remarks remain true.

What a real Lakers team has done lately is use air strikes to selectively suppress ISIS forces – individual artillery pieces- and then precision air-drop food and water that is enabling 40,000 Yazidis to escape from ISIS encirclement on Mount Sinjar.  All from half way around the world.

Before yielding to panic, a more balanced assessment of the threat ISIS represents is needed.  One ought do what General Ulysses S. Grant used to do: look at the weaknesses of the enemy and seek ways to exploit them.

What are the weaknesses of ISIS?  They can be reduced to three: (1) that ISIS is militarily overextended; (2) they have now come out of the shadows and, having done so, created hostages to fortune; (3) they have created new enemies in the Islamic world on account of having proclaimed a Caliphate.

ISIS is said to comprise some 10,000 fighters, of which 6,000 are in Iraq.  Of these 6,000, half are said to be “foreign” fighters, that is, Muslims whose primary residence is in Europe, Australia, or North America.  These foreign fighters fight for ISIS for the personal satisfaction of engaging in jihad and for the chance to indulge in the blackest of human desires.  ISIS has posted on the social websites the gruesome atrocities its members have committed against innocent victims.  Members of ISIS have also demolished ancient structures of veneration of both Muslim and Christian faiths.

ISIS boosts the strength of its numbers by the terror they inspire.  Like a stock market gripped with irrational exuberance, the prospects of ISIS get better and better.

The tough Kurdish Pershmurga once showed reluctance to engage ISIS out of fear of a terrible death should they be captured.  Now that they believe America will stand by them, they have recaptured lost territory and are helping rescue the Yazidis.

The fact remains that there are only a limited number of ISIS fighters, who cannot be everywhere at once.  Half of these are foreigners for whom home will eventually beckon.  Each new recruit represents an untrained, undisciplined mouth to feed.  With one serious morale-breaking defeat, these foreigners will find home beckoning strongly, and will desert the cause.  One serious morale-breaking defeat and the myth of ISIS invincibility will be shattered, and with it the effectiveness of their use of terror.  After a defeat, the employment of gruesome murder would be seen as a sign of desperation, not as a sign of holy rage.  The fortunes of ISIS would collapse as rapidly as it grew.

Video clips of ISIS in battle have shown nothing except that they have mastered the art of driving pickup trucks in convoy.  They have not demonstrated the capacity to maneuver substantial bodies of troops in a real battle.  They lack the staff, the communications, the training and the discipline to do so.  And by a ‘real battle’ I mean a mere brigade-sized action, which would require the fielding of the majority of their fighting force in Iraq.

As between a pickup truck sporting a machine gun and an Abrams tank, there is no doubt about the outcome of a trial by battle.  One reason for the utter collapse in morale in the Iraqi government forces when faced with the ISIS incursion was the pilfering of soldier’s pay by the Iraqi officers.  Few men are willing to fight for a man who stole his wages.  At one time, the Iraqi army boasted of its fearsome Republican Guard divisions, which fought American troops tenaciously.  Now former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki allowed the Iraqi army to rot from within.

In a conventional army, seven or eight men are needed to support one man in combat.  Nearly all of the ISIS men are described as “fighters,” meaning few or none of them do what is done by the seven or eight men in a conventional army.  ISIS will find it difficult, then, to replenish itself with ammunition and other necessities in the event of a major battle.  It is also vulnerable to a battle of attrition.

Having proclaimed a Caliphate and called upon all Muslims to “obey” him, the boss of ISIS, Caliph Ibrahim, created more weaknesses.  With a Caliphate and the naming of Mosul as its temporary capital city, ISIS has come out of the shadows.  It has real property, and it pretends to govern.  Upon the first act of terrorism committed or attempted against the United States by the Caliphate, its cities are liable to a retaliatory strike.  The home town of Saddam Hussein, Tikrit, could easily be flattened by the United States Air Force in retaliation for another underwear bomber tied to the Caliphate.  If the Caliph wants a war of terrorism, America has the power to fill his boots with it.

Like other terrorists, the Caliph has made ferocious threats.  “We will see you in New York,” he said.  To get there under his own power, the Caliph and his emissaries have to board a commercial airliner and pass through U.S. Customs before they can strike the homeland.  Not exactly a Utah beach like threat of invasion.

By claiming to be the Caliph, Ibrahim has said indirectly that the Kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and the presidents of Egypt, Turkey, and Iran are his vassals and their countries are under his suzerainty.  I wonder how they feel about that?  Perhaps western diplomats should ask them about their diminished status in the world.

The Caliphate is a crisis in the Islamic world.  Only by having threatened to attack the United States has it deflected attention from the crisis it poses to the current Islamic order.  A Caliphate undermines the religious legitimacy of the governments of other Islamic countries.  ISIS is far more a threat to the Middle East than it is to the United States.

If a means can be found to inflict casualties on ISIS in a continual way, or if it can be brought to battle by a serious military, ISIS will deflate like a broken balloon.

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