In Fact Obama Does Have an ISIS Strategy, and it Involves Iran

[eridani]

Obama is patient and smart, but it's looking more and more like there just aren't any good solutions. Other than not constantly intervening in the region at all. Secular Iran was overthrown in 1953, so it's 60 years too late for that.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/25745-focus-in-fact-obama-does-have-isis-strategy-and-it-involves-iran

Since mid-August, the U.S. has been acting as Iraq’s de facto air force. American aircraft are bombing ISIS targets and supporting offensives by Kurdish forces, the Iraqi military and militia groups that were yesterday’s anti-American jihadists and are today’s anti-ISIS allies.

<snip>

“The ground coalitions we’re supporting with air power are uniquely different in each case,” said Doug Ollivant, a former advisor to Gen. David Petraeus who served in the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “In Sinjar, it’s largely the PKK [a Kurdish militia] who rescued the Yazidis,” Ollivant said. “In Mosul, it was the Golden Brigades [An elite unit of the Iraqi army] with the Peshmerga in support, and in Amerli it looks like Shia militias with the Iraqi military in support.

Not all of these allies would ordinarily be considered friends of America. The PKK, which by some accounts has been leading the fight against ISIS in northern Iraq, is still listed as a foreign terrorist organization.

<snip>

The president has been criticized for lacking a larger strategy to deal with ISIS but he’s been consistent on Iraq, stressing that military force can only be effective as the prelude to a political solution. To push ISIS out of Iraq, the thinking goes, Baghdad needs to reintegrate marginalized Sunnis who have supported but are not ideologically aligned with the group. But the difficult task of dislodging ISIS from its Sunni support base will only become harder as Shia sectarian groups increases their influence in Baghdad and appear to receive U.S. backing.

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Well, it's somewhat reassuring that the Obama people

are showing some cultural awareness in their dealings with this hornets nest, unlike their Bushie predecessors, who thought Sunni had something to do with weather forecasting term and Shiite was a scatological reference.

[tularetom]

2. "military force can only be effective as the prelude to a political solution"

Those are kind of empty words. Like we're going to bomb some hardasses into seeing the error of their ways.

I'm not at all sure there is a "political solution" to this mess. Short of the British admitting that the creation of a fake country by the Mandate of Mesopotamia was a mistake and allowing the country to be divvied up among the various factions.

[flamingdem]

3. The US can deal with Iran via the Kurds

That's already going on - or through the Iraqi army.