The pentagon tells us that more than 50,000 bombs have been dropped on ISIS targets by U.S-led coalition drones and warplanes in Iraq and Syria in the last two and a half years or so, killing some 25,000 ISIS militants and causing ISIS to relinquish massive chunks of its self-declared caliphate. The announcement that the fight to take back Mosul was beginning came just hours after ISIS lost Dabiq, a village in Syria they had said was where Armageddon would play out in an apocalyptic battle with infidel forces from the West. (It was reported that ISIS forces fled Dabiq when Syrian rebels, backed by Turkey and reportedly advised by U.S. Special Forces, pushed into the town.)
In recent months, ISIS has lost a number of top leaders in U.S. airstrikes, including its chief of external operations, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, in and Wa’il Adil Hasan Salman al-Fayad, the minister of information and a member of the ruling Shura Council. One administration official reportedly described the situation as “a rapidly crumbling caliphate… under more pressure than ever before.”
So goes the administration’s “feckless” – Mike Pence’s favorite new word – foreign policy generally and its program for squashing ISIS in particular, as the coalition moves on the last ISIS stronghold of Mosul. As for the attack on Mosul, the United States, it is reported, has played a key role in coordinating rival Iraqi forces for the operation, and with the recent addition of another six hundred troops, the U.S. now has more than five thousand personnel deployed in Iraq and another few hundred Special Forces in Syria.
Meanwhile, as Josh Rogin wrote in The Washigton Post: “For months, Donald Trump has been promising to be tough on the Islamic State and has criticized the Obama administration for not taking the fight to the terrorists. Now that the battle of Mosul is underway, Trump has become a cheerleader for the failure of the mission while promoting a conspiracy theory that it’s all about him.”
Trump’s conspiracy theory: The Obama administration began the assault on Mosul “because Obama wanted to show what a tough guy he is before the election.”
Trump has already declared the Mosul operation a failure – a “disaster” in fact -- but still has not said what he would do to combat ISIS that has not been done, other than he would “knock the hell out of” them. (So much more sophisticated than the planning of the senior military advisors that has eviscerated ISIS over the past couple of years.)
Josh Rogin: ‘Trump’s statements on how he would combat the Islamic State have been all over the map. At various times he has said his plans are ‘secret,’ endorsed the torture of suspected terrorists, pledged to kill their families and promised to 'take the oil,' which makes no sense at all.”
As for Trump’s talk – well-known military tactician that he is, due, presumably, to his attendance at a military prep school -- about famous WWII generals turning over in their graves at the failure of the U.S. military to make the attack on Mosul a surprise, there’s this from the news/opinion site Vox:
Preparing to launch a massive military operation to retake Iraq’s second-largest city is not the kind of thing that can be done stealthily. It’s literally not possible to move tens of thousands of troops, heavy artillery, and other equipment to the outskirts of the city a couple of hours before the attack is supposed to begin. Making matters even harder, the 20,000 to 30,000 troops that will take part in the offensive aren’t part of a central, unified command. Moving fighters from so many different groups — some members of a formal army, some just tribal fighters with minimal training — and all of their weapons and equipment into place around a city as big as Mosul takes a while. And the idea that all that activity would go unnoticed by ISIS fighters in Mosul and the surrounding areas beggars belief.”
(In this connection, there have been a good many comparisons to the invasion of Europe on D-Day, which, critics point out, was kept a secret by the allies as to where and when it would occur. If that could be done with an operation as massive as D-Day, why not Mosul? Well, the “where” part of the secret-keeping is going to be a problem for this line of argument, since any attack on Mosul would take place at…well, Mosul. [Where else? Cincinnati?] As for the when, see the above paragraph.)
Trumps posturing on this subject has been nothing short of buffoonish. He has no clue what he’s talking about, and makes it up as he goes along. He has no experience in this area, no knowledge, no expertise. But, of course, that doesn’t stop him from offering up his ridiculous opinions on the matter, and it doesn’t stop his followers from siding with him on this as opposed to the dozens-to-hundreds of senior military staff who actually know what they’re doing. ("Doh! Why didn't we think of that?" they prob ably said when told about the sneak-attack stratagem.)
As all of this is going on in the Middle East – that is, as dreams of an Islamic State, or
Caliphate, are being relegated to the dustbin of history – efforts to inflict damage and casualties in western countries by people affiliated with ISIS or inspired by it, and by jihadists and assorted other members of the lunatic fringe, will doubtless continue. But that’s not about battalions deployed in the Middle East and the taking of territory by way of large military operations. It’s about hard and smart work by the intelligence communities and police in the targeted countries, including the U.S. Stamping out ISIS on the other side of the world will not stop these attacks. Perhaps nothing will stop all of them. But police and intelligence work, not tough-guy promises to “knock the hell out of them,” are our best hope.
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