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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