Perpetual war as background noise — half-assing against ISIS

© 2016 Peter Free

 

06 September 2016

 

 

Half-measures against ISIS


According to Mark Thompson's article in Time magazine, the American military does not approve of President Obama's approach to controlling ISIS. They evidently think that air warring by itself is an idiot's game.

 

On the other hand, given the US military's impressively long string of strategic failures since World War II, the President may think that his Administration's half-measures are exactly what are required.

 

He can argue that he is managing chronic terrorist circumstances. As with the practice of medicine, some illnesses are chronic and cannot be cured. One shoots mildly, day to day, trying only to suppress the disease's worst manifestations.

 

Is this analogy valid?

 

 

Notice the lack of thoughtful analysis from both sides

 

President Obama has done a miserable job of communicating whatever it is he thinks about the Greater Middle East generally. His unrealistic idea that arming "moderate" Syrian militants would turn the civil war tide sticks in my mind. The predictable outcome was too ridiculous even to make a good joke.

 

And for our generals' part, Mark Thompson recently reported that:

 

 

James Mattis, a retired Marine general who commanded Central Command from 2010 to 2013, says the war on ISIS is “unguided by a sustained policy or sound strategy [and is] replete with half-measures.”

 

Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine four-star who held the same post from 1997 to 2000, says he doesn’t think he could do so today.

 

“I don’t want to be part of a strategy that in my heart of hearts I know is going to fail,” he says. “It’s a bad strategy, it’s the wrong strategy, and maybe I would tell the President that he would be better served to find somebody who believes in it, whoever that idiot may be.”

 

“Doing nothing would be far preferable to this mess,” says Daniel Bolger, a retired Army three-star who commanded troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq before retiring in 2013.

 

He plucks a quote from . . . . a French general after he witnessed the doomed charge of the British Light Brigade against the Russians in the Crimean War in 1854: “It is magnificent, but it is not war . . . . It is madness.”

 

Current U.S. commanders say their progress is limited by the lack of local ground forces to retake territory from ISIS.

 

© 2016 Mark Thompson, Former U.S. Commanders Take Increasingly Dim View of War on ISIS, Time (31 August 2016) (resequenced extracts)

 

 

Presumably, retaking lost ground would work as well as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Which is to say not at all.

 

 

The moral? — Stupidity or greed?

 

As visitors to this website know, I have concluded that the unending stream of war profit motivates decades of American strategic asininity abroad. Once greed and organizational status-seeking are in the picture, we require no other explanation for the origin of obviously unworkable strategies.

 

With us, it is always more permutations of essentially the same war.

 

No matter how badly the last dose of chronic illness management turned out, a torrent of war money continues to roll into American pockets. Advancement in military and civilian rank continue unabated, no matter how idiotically our leaders performed.

 

In the United States there is no price to pay for proving to be (or have been) an influential dumbshit.

 

Notice that the generals who spoke out about our ISIS endeavor are retired. And not one (even now) appears to have a plan that would avoid repeating past mistakes.

 

In sum, the American War Machine has inertial momentum of its own. It wanders around like a Roomba, sucking up money and lives.

 

Meanwhile, our Homeland Security Apparatus continues to hype fear. Justifying more Roombas in more places. Reliably creating more terrorists to attract still more Roombas.

 

This is (admittedly) a pretty good business model. But one has to willing to be labeled as either morally hypocritical or strategically stupid to take public pride in having created it.

 

So we continue. Pretending that our death-dealing is intelligently high-minded.

 

Our adversaries do not make us greedy, stupid or unprincipled. We do that ourselves. Which may have been General Zinni's point about honor and idiots.