Isis: David Cameron plans to go to war, but has not produced realistic plans for defeating the group

[Jefferson23]

Despite all the furious rhetoric after the Paris killings, Isis does not look as if is going to be under pressure that it cannot withstand

Patrick Cockburn

46 minutes ago

David Cameron made a reasonable case last week for Britain going to war with Isis in Syria; what he did not do is explain how this war is going to be won by Britain or anybody else. Even now, 18 months after Isis captured Mosul, there is a tendency by world leaders to underestimate its political and military strength.

Mr Cameron said that “military action [by the US, UK and others] seeks to degrade Isis’s capabilities, so that Iraqi security forces can effectively secure Iraq and moderate forces in Syria can defend the territory they control”.


It would certainly be nice if that happened, except that the Iraqi state security forces are demoralised, dysfunctional and have had difficulty finding new recruits since they have been repeatedly defeated by Isis over the past two years. In Syria, we are to look to 70,000 “moderate” fighters whose existence Mr Cameron revealed to the House of Commons, but nobody in Syria has ever heard of.

Isis is not going to be defeated by these phantom armies which are to be Britain’s allies in Iraq and Syria. It is the same weakness as in Iraq in 2003 and in Afghanistan a little later – in both cases, Britain was a junior partner in a US-led coalition that pretended to have local allies, but in practice these were too feeble to contribute much.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/isis-david-cameron-plans-to-go-to-war-but-has-not-produced-realistic-plans-for-defeating-the-group-a6752991.html

[KoKo]

1. A bit more from the article:

The politics of war in Syria are extraordinarily complicated, and it was probably inevitable that Britain would be sucked into this morass. Everybody agrees that there is no appetite today in Britain for sending ground troops, though this could change overnight if there were a repeat of the Paris massacre in London.

But, if there was such an intervention, Britain, the US and France, would all be hobbled militarily by their contradictory policy of trying to fight extreme Sunni jihadis like Isis and al-Nusra, while maintaining their alliance with powerful Sunni states like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies. This has been the pattern since the US launched its “war on terror” after 9/11, but avoided confrontation with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

[Jefferson23]

2. Yes, and maybe we'll see a change. I haven't given up all hope yet.

Off topic..hope you had a happy Thanksgiving, KoKo.

[KoKo]

3. ....

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