With the Islamic militant group, ISIS, seizing control of the last border crossing between Iraq and Syria, the massive collation of World Powers assures the public that this is merely a tactically setback. While the US does admit that pushing ISIS out of the 95000 sq km (roughly 50% of Syria) would be difficult, experts insist that the majority of this territory holds no significant strategic value. I suppose this is too serious a topic to joke about. This extremist group has been responsible for over 17000 civilian deaths in the last year. They are guilty of numerous atrocities and crimes against humanity, yet despite US-Iraqi efforts, their ranks have only swelled. The failure to adequately deal with a small splinter cell and to allow it to grow to this extent calls into question the US' effectiveness in the Middle East and the validity of its involvement. The half in, half out methods of "no boots on the ground" doesn't seem to work very well. Though the military advisers placed reek eerily of the Vietnam War, I doubt a large scale escalation is anywhere on the radar.
What do you think?
Should the US send more than just advisers?
Or how else should we address the issues in the region?
3 comments:
This issue should be discussed in the U.N. if it has not been already. There, it must be agreed upon that ISIS is an organization that is needed to be stopped. Action should be taken against ISIS, but not necessarily by the U.S. Iraq stated before that it simply did not want American troops on Iraqi soil, and it is a question whether or not the United States could even afford another war. For America to invade Iraq to fight ISIS also be almost disregarding the real problem that there is a lot of conflict of interest in the Arab world, not only a terrorist group.
A cease fire obviously does not seem possible at this point so it is in the interest of the international community to eliminate the danger of ISIS in the most practical manner possible. We can't just launch a campaign in the Middle East as we don't want to kill even more civilians and you never know what assortment of arms a large terrorist group like ISIS can get a hold. Arming locals who are not affiliated with those groups would be worthwhile as they have a better idea of the terrain and they also have political interests at stake.
If I'm not mistaken, the US has already done so. The US has been backing the Kurds pretty seriously and they've done some heavy damage to ISIS, but even there, the US has tried to walk a careful line. They don't want the Kurds to start attacking Turkey, a US ally. Herein lies the problem with arming local resistance groups. While they may share a common enemy or objective fore the time being, they might end up being enemies in the future. This was the case in Syria as there were fears about arming the more ideological groups in the Syrian civil war as it was in Afghanistan when the US armed local resistance troops to fight against occupying Soviet Union forces. (Guess where Osama bin Laden came from)
Post a Comment