The liberals can come after me all they want. I usually don't have to worry about them blowing themselves over two acres of wallpaper. They just spew rhetoric, and not a kidney at mach two.
I watched part of the Obama statement from the economic summit today. He's done. He's lost his nerve, and has no capacity to make critical decisions on the prosecution of a military campaign that will inflict the losses required to shut ISIS down. He has tempered his decision making based on his trips to hospitals to see injured vets. Obviously this has affected his decision making. I'm not saying he can't feel empathy and sympathy for them, and that he can't feel bad that they were injured. He knew when he took the job, that sending people to war means they die and get maimed. Now he's trying to make war 'safe' again.
The following will be VERY CONTROVERSIAL, but read it a couple times to let it percolate. In order to WIN this fight, not just contain or degrade ISIS, we are going to have to be prepared to kill...innocent civilians. Before you flip out, read the WHOLE post.
The reason why the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda and Hamas and Hezbollah is taking so long is that post WW2 we took the total inhumanity of the strategic bombing campaigns that were engaged in, and tried to make war 'safer' for non-combatants. In WW2 we flattened entire cities to destroy factories capable of making weapons. We flattened train stations, bus depots, and ports for ships in order to deny the enemy war making capabilities. When we did that, we killed the workers at those locations, and bombed nearby housing with the 'misses'.
After the war, countries proclaimed such wholesale killing had to stop. So, we worked on 'smart' bombs. Drop fewer bombs, have higher rates of success hitting the intended targets, and fewer civilians would have to die. Yea for technology!
We then tried to leverage that thinking into other facets of military strategy. 'Smart' artillery shells, mortar shells, even 'smart' bullets. War-fighting was supposed to become this clean, clinical, lest we say surgical expression of state sanctioned violence and was meant to eradicate the enemy with a minimum of fuss.
Problem is, we wound up fighting urban warfare campaigns in areas where the buildings were still standing. Where we might be able to task a tank to hit a building, but surely couldn't level entire neighborhoods anymore. THAT would be a war crime, right?
So now, ONE of the reasons why you have PTSD is that soldiers were forced to fight in a much more restricted battle space in which the enemy held the upper hand of terrain. The enemy also held the advantage of using the civilian population as human shields through which we were not allowed to engage them. You forced young men and women to be constantly exposed to an enemy that they weren't allowed to kill or even engage. All the while, the enemy itself had no rules. Car bombs, truck bombs, roadside bombs, bike bombs, even child bombs. They would shoot at you by lying on the ground and firing from under the burka of a woman who could only stand still or be shot by the terrorist, or have her family be killed because she failed to help the terrorist. Make an 18 yr old American kid decide that he has to shoot the woman in order to flush out the terrorist. Nope, that won't mess you up. Again, we made the mistake of trying to fight an enemy 'by the rules' for whom the rules DON'T EXIST.
We prided ourselves in saying that because we don't kill civilians we were the better people. We were more civilized. We were morally superior. So, how's that worked out for ya? Huh? Seriously. Have we actually 'won' a war in the last oh say 25 years?
Now. If you want to DEFEAT ISIS you issue an ultimatum. Civilians have 48 hours to leave. The military will establish checkpoints to validate those leaving. After that, the real WAR begins. Any place that is ISIS controlled is eligible to be wiped off the map.
If the wives, old folks, and kids didn't leave town, that's no longer on us. You use cluster munitions to attack large tracts of battle space, and you use land mines to deny ISIS the ability to run in all directions. You use snipers to take out ISIS members trying to clear the minefields, and you can starve them out if you want to be more 'civil' about it.
Less civil is you simply carpet bomb ISIS into oblivion. They will only understand stark, utter and brutal violence when it comes to visit them in the dead of night and turns their world upside down.
Since Obama has already decided that the U.S. will not deploy ground troops in any significant number, he will be left with the choice of either walking away, or ACTUALLY killing terrorists on a wholesale level. If that means killing their families as well, you'll do it knowing that you gave them more of a chance to survive than they would ever have given you.
This is the fastest way to get
*drops mic*
the Guy is just not POTUS-Material!
Doubt if he ever had any Nerve to be CIC of the US!
A stolen Shape that's all he is!