Kurt Schlichter on what eliminating ISIS as a threat would actually look like…
… with a competent president.
32 thoughts on “Salting The Sand”
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Shot in the Dark
Cranking Open The Big Brass Nozzle Of Truth Since 2002
Look, MBerg, Obama has already explained to us that he is not interested in things like victory or leadership.
Might as well try to get milk from an alligator.
The U.S. should back away from removing al-Assad and focus its energy solely on ISIS. Have France, Great Britain, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the US quietly sit down somewhere outside of public/media view. Possibly include Jordan. Keep Iraq out.
Allies are hard, but losing is harder. Time to sign up some people we might disagree with on outcomes, but agree with on the first steps.
Using the same rules of engagement preferred by Obama, the invasion of France in 1944 would have gone backwards into the English Channel.
And Pearl Harbor would have just been a “set back”.
I see Obama says the Syrians he wants to import are mostly “widows and orphans”. I really think Obama is just a leftwing blogger. He has no leadership skills and hates the traditional US. His Marxist upbringing is really showing.
I see Obama says the Syrians he wants to import are mostly “widows and orphans”.
Obama has no idea. He’s just making it up as he goes along. And a compliant press won’t ask him how he knows this, and the system is closed to review so no one can find out the truth.
The refugees flooding Europe are about 65% male. This fits the profile of economic refugees, not refugees from a civil war.
In my circles, this option is known as “Going Full Roman On Their A**es.” It may not be a permanent solution – Rome eventually did lose control of the Middle East – but it’ll give us time to find a better one.
Nothing like scorched earth to make one a believer of mortality.
Obama keeps saying he wants peace. Unfortunately it takes two sides to make a peace and only one side to make a war and you do NOT want to be on the other side of that. But peace could be obtained easily, according to the old movie line, because “Ain’t nobody more peaceable than a dead man.”
I don’t know that we need to go scorched earth–seems that this didn’t work too well in Vietnam, to put it mildly–but it would be nice if we at least could destroy fuel and ammunition convoys without dropping leaflets warning them. To put it mildly, Eisenhower did not hesitate to carpet bomb Mayen, Germany when he learned that Schicklgruber was assembling tank columns there during the Battle of the Bulge.
scorched earth = lessons from our civil war, a combination of US Grant (attack with overwhelming force and be willing to take casualties) and WT Sherman (break their will by taking out their infrastructure and capacity to finance the war)
Scorched earth was working in Viet Name we just didn’t have a political class willing to close the deal – they kept talking about “limited warfare”, “proportional response” while McNamara proved conclusively that MBO (Management By Objectives) does not win wars.
Bubba, it worked famously in Vietnam. US decimated the enemy but lost the war because of politics back home. If they would have stuck it out, Ho Chi Minh City would still be Saigon.
Scorched earth worked to submit Japan and save untold number of American lives.
“Kill them all. Let Allah sort them out,”
I don’t know that we need to go scorched earth–seems that this didn’t work too well in Vietnam, to put it mildly–
Read the article. Scorched earth there explicitly states no safe harbors. The US famously refused to take the war to North Vietnam. US tactics destroyed the Viet Cong; they were not an issue by the end of the war. What lost South Vietnam was an invasion by the North after the Democratic US Congress refused to live up to our agreement with South Vietnam. Note that all we ever really did in the North were air strikes. Hmmm, any similarity between our policies in Vietnam and our policies now?
But you have to have some guts on this, and enough determination to take civilian casualties as a cost of defeating an enemy. Russia did this with the Chechens. They’re not “defeated” but they’re not the threat they once were to Russia. It took eliminating 25% of all Chechen males and the usual Russian revenge scenario where the perp’s family pays for the attacks, but I doubt you’ll find many Russians expressing much regret over the cost to the Chechens.
In Vietnam we lost 60,000 KIA. The NVA and the Viet Cong lost between one and two million KIA.
Yep, that war was unwinnable, alright.
Stupid commie hippies.
This reminds me of the old saying in Vietnam that if the US wanted to win they should move the Cholon PX to Hanoi and give the ROKs a map.
JD wrote: “In my circles, this option is known as “Going Full Roman On Their A**es.” It may not be a permanent solution”….
Back in the good old days A.D. 16 to be exact, Tiberius called off a long series of reprisal offensives across the Rhine against the German tribes the Cherusci, the Arminius and the Marcomannic.
The cause of those reprisals was the ambush and destruction of three Legions (XVII, XVII, and XIX) under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus in the dense swampy Teutoberg Forest.
Varus was not a general but a lawyer and administrator sent to organize the taxation of the eastern Rhine frontier and led his three Legion escort into a well-planned trap.
The Romans by nature were a people disinclined to whine or ring hands and took their revenge in a series of bloody campaigns against the German tribes over seven years. Tiberius inherited these campaigns from Augustus and while they killed a lot Germans they were still expensive and disrupted many other Roman diplomatic priorities.
Tiberius was a highly intelligent strategist and superb general. After succeeding Augustus in A. D. 14 he developed a new strategy of leaving the German tribes to themselves and sealing the Rhine frontier upon its western bank.
As soon as the Roman threat was removed the tribes returned to their natural state of butchering one another. This allowed the Romans to construct a series of client Kingdoms from the lower Rhine to the middle Danube in order to quarantine the brawling Germans into their forests.
The Roman Legions and their auxiliaries were then able to perform the function of a mobile reserve to corral and defeat any attempts by the German to leave the quarantine area.
Perhaps there is something here to learn?
Short version of Emery Incognito: Get Out. Stay Out. Erect a Cordon Sanitaire around the place. Let Them Get On With It. (I’m OK with air dropping a pallet of 7.62 x 39 and some RPGs on every population center about once a month).
One general rule of strategic gaming is that every course of action needed to be planned out to take into account the second order and third order consequences of our actions. Every new player (who always brings new interests) increases the math exponentially. The quantitative guys call this “degrees of freedom”: the number of values in the final calculation of an outcome that are free to vary. This problem with our ISIS strategy is that it has a large number of degrees of freedom.
To game this one out, one would have to be able to envision 15th and 23rd order consequences — a task beyond most mortal imaginations, I would assume.
Thinking beyond the gaming aspects to the nature of the threat, I decided that (for me) most of the threats that ISIS poses to vital American interests are not direct threats. ISIS isn’t coming here in force anytime soon. Rather, ISIS has the capability to cause states and actors in the region to realign in ways we haven’t seen before. Some of these realignments might be good for our interests and others quite bad.
America knows how disturbing such changes can be. Because we have perpetrated them ourselves. Our last decade of messing in the region changed the Sunni/Shia balance in favor of the Shia (not, perhaps, what Cheney had in mind, but certainly his true legacy). That change gave rise to ISIS.
If, in five or ten years, ISIS changes the regional balance again — not back to traditional cautious Sunni monarchies/autocracies, but to some new balance in which Sunni fundamentalism is a characteristic of many of the states in the region, that shift could have serious consequences for the United States.
Will bombing Sunnis in Iraq and Syria alter that risk? Perhaps not. Could it increase that risk? Perhaps. Are we sliding towards another quagmire? Maybe. I will watch with some trepidation
A ‘cordon sanitaire’ is out of the question. We (meaning the US) can’t even get around to checking whether people who arrived on temporary visas leave when they are supposed to.
A ‘cordon sanitaire’ is incompatible with economic globalism. Whether you like globalism or not, it is responsible for much of the economic growth in the world (and the US) in the last quarter century.
The American response has been to endorse the idea of a Global War on Terror. Use globalism against the enemy. Find out how they are being funded and cut the funding off at the source with a trans Atlantic phone call. Send drones in kill people we want to kill. Avoid boots on the ground (the UN doesn’t like it).
This is a Bush-Cheney policy endorsed by the Current Occupant (though he would never admit it).
Globalism has promoted growth in the US? Have you looked at our trade deficit recently? Seen our debt calculations? Seen where all the job growth has occurred in the US (hint: it’s not natives that have seen any job growth, it’s been the immigrants)?
Globalization is the mechanism by which the US exported its inflation to remote workforces and in return helped those with capital (money and intellectual) to prosper at the expense of the working class. Having extracted the available return, those with more monetary capital are working their way up the food chain to impoverish those with intellectual capital (H1-Bs, anyone?).
Essentially, the US has gone on a massive credit and debt binge, financed by exporting its jobs and future prosperity in return for consumer goods now. It’s highly unwise and we will be paying for our cheap high down the road.
Ending Islamic terrorism is possible, but I doubt that most Americans could stomach the cost. You would have to fundamentally reshape the societies of much of the Middle East and the number of people you would have to do to do that would terrify most folks. That’s not to say that we couldn’t get there if provoked badly enough. A series of Beslan-style attacks by ISIS in the US would probably lead to a US reaction that would make the Russian response look tame, for example.
Nerdbert-
I am not pro-globalization.
I haven’t visited the BEA.gov site in the last year or two, but I once did research that showed a lion’s share of US GDP growth, 2000-2010, was finance and banking, and this sector relies on globalization for growth.
I’m not saying it’s a good way to grow GDP, but it is axiomatic that it is more economically efficient to have a television assembled by a person who is paid $5,000/year than it is to have the same television assembled by a person who makes $50,000/year.
If you’ve read any of my comments regarding immigration you know how I feel about globalization (I am AKA Prussian Blue, and I forget who I was before that).
But facts must be faced. There is a reason why the leadership of virtually every modern nation wants to knit the world’s economies closer together. It looks good on paper.
As Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.”
Hiding behind trade barriers, which creates a weak and brittle economy dependent on government fiat, is not and has never been a solution to the problem.
“which creates a weak and brittle economy dependent on government fiat,”
Good Lord, Emery, what kind of economy do you think that we have now?
Where will growth come from when there is nowhere to go to get cheaper labor?
I’ve got no problem with Scorched Earth Warfare. I subscribe to the idea that when you do go to war, you fight to kill the enemy and destroy their ability and will to threaten you. Everything I’ve read from people that have actually spent time in the Middle East and Afghanistan agrees that that is the language understood in those cultures. Our attempts to treat them like we do each other only serves to convince them that we are week, feminine, and will fold when push comes to shove.
The only thing I would add to Kurt’s scenario is that after the war is won and ISIS is destroyed, is that troops are withdrawn and we leave the area with a warning of what will happen if we need to return. Rebuilding and democratization won’t be forced on them.
Some of the earlier comments on this thread say that ISIS is an existential threat to the U.S. I’d point out that the scenario laid out starts with Paris style attacks on U.S. soil (the Phoenix and Dallas specifics were a nice touch). Whether or not ISIS can strike us at home or not is a valid question. The response if they do, not so much.
Correction, it should say that comments say that ISIS is not an existential threat.
Neither Germany or Japan was an existential threat to the United States in December 1941. Japan would have settled for free reign in the Pacific east of Hawaii. Germany would have settled for the price of the US abandoning its British and Russian allies.
Foreign armies will never be a long term solution to the wars of post-colonial Arab succession. They must settle this themselves. Support the groups that seem most amenable to our values, but stay out of the direct fighting. There are things worse than terrorism, and occupying parts of the Middle East is one of them. At most, go in with a UN mandate to establish a safe zone within Iraq/Syria for refugees. But to go in with western troops to occupy Mosul or Raqqa is crazy; what is the end game? Supporting Saudi Arabia or the countries of the Gulf is also crazy; they are ultimately the source of the ideology and the money that supports ISIS.
If the number of Westerners who die in terrorist attacks each year is too small to be important, then clearly the few thousand Palestinian Arabs who die at the hands of the Israelis hardly merits the world’s attention.
The problem with your thesis, Emery, is that it assumes that the ME can be cordoned off. If the US and the Europeans back off, it doesn’t mean the ME nations will sort things out for themselves. It means they will be controlled by the Russians or the Chinese.
It would be nice to be peace makers, but what method do you choose? Invading a country, establishing a new constitution, and holding elections has been tried and failed. Levying sanctions doesn’t make peace. Sending in bombers to hit military targets or drones to assassinate awkward leaders may have benefits but doesn’t make peace. Being best friends with Israel for almost 70 years hasn’t made Israel peaceful or solved the West Bank problem.
The initiative must come from those who live in the region. In the meantime, we can help to keep the peace outside the region, but I don’t see how we can make peace inside of it. The people in the region clearly aren’t ready to stop fighting.
What is missing (since Carter) is a strategic concept, an end game and a long-term view of what kind of Middle East we can live with.
Sending in bombers to hit military targets or drones to assassinate awkward leaders may have benefits but doesn’t make peace.
Really? REALLY? Japan? Germany? WWII? Remember those? Of course not! The only history EmeryTheAntisemiticSoci@list believes in is the one he writes himself. But would you expect anything less from a person who believes Carter to be a political genius. Oh, wait, they are of a kind, both anti-Semites.