The President Decided

The President has decided: given American foreign policy up to now, he couldn't have decided otherwise, because America Leads the Mideast….towards "order."

Oh, it could be worse. If McCain were President, and he always wishes he were, we'd be flying in troops by the thousands and bombing the hell outta the whole Syria-Iraq borderlands.

But order means we're going to bomb the hell outta some of them, and call it a "counter-terrorist" action, not a war. A war would come under the War Powers Act, requiring Congressional approval. Also, Obama wants to be against war, even if he starts one.

Obama asks for some kind of support from Congress; Republicans don't want to stop him, or condemn him; some even may be coming around to support the action. However, one Republican Congressman remarked: they'd applaud if things go well, and say "you should have acted much earlier," if the action fails. Earlier means when they were urging Obama to bomb Syria for its chemical weapons. Most Republicans have wanted every war since WWII, even when there were Democratic Presidents benefiting from wars at the polls.

Wait a minute! Could Obama be doing something similar? ISIL is a horror, but perhaps a convenient horror. Until this crisis, Obama was "embattled" and increasingly unpopular, so much so, that many Democratic candidates welcomed his efforts to raise money for them, but avoided joint appearances.

On the other hand, Obama's proposal embodies the success of ISIL propaganda and strategy. ISIL staged the beheadings of American journalists to accomplish two goals: bolster their image of ruthlessness to recruit western extremists, and goad the US into acting against them, to broaden their anti-western appeal. Baghdadi, after all, speaks of the Califate, meaning world rule, not just swathes of two war-torn nations.

Obama's "decisive action" will rally the troops and neutralize the opposition. Given the tilt towards war in all the "major" media, ISIL is a convenient pretext.

Obama's "decisive action:" means bombing, degrading and destroying ISIL. Sounds like what we did to al Qaeda. Now, the US is leading a regional coalition, to stop ISIL: stopping the flow of money, for example from Saudi Arabia; regaining control of borders, launching incursions from them, and supporting "moderate" militias and the Iraqi army. The US commitment is leadership, air war attack force, training, materiel and Intel.

We started out in Vietnam with less, and we've already been in Iraq two times before. We could be sucked back into the mire of the Middle East, not only in Iraq, but now in Syria, as well.

On the other hand, Obama may get lucky. ISIL is a freak opponent that seems to appeal to the most crazed, even of some American youth, but is hated by the people they've conquered. Hundreds to thousands are slaughtered, many randomly, at first. Then the survivors undergo looting, high taxes and a repressive social order, brutally enforced.

Why does ISIL exist? Because the US and allies were arming Syrian insurgents, and ISIL was adept at getting enough arms to capture more from their competitors in the Syrian civil war, while supposedly fighting to overthrow Assad. They then expanded in eastern Syria, controlling whole provinces, driving out more secular and moderate rebels.

Then, with superior tactics and morale, they took Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, and captured the huge amount of weaponry we had bestowed on the dispirited Iraqi army. Since embittered ex-military (from Saddam's disbanded army) joined ISIL in droves, it had the technical skills to turn those sophisticated weapons south, and expand their domain of control dramatically and suddenly. Massacres, mass rapes and even attempted genocide followed. ISIL's leader openly threatened to annihilate the Tacridis; Shiites were given a choice: convert instantly to Sunni Islam, or die an infidel.

Brute force works for a while, and forced conversions are a tradition in the Mideast going back millennia. However, they aren't a way to gain popular support, nor are the massacres and repression.

ISIL is a mile high and an inch deep.

There is no reason why the US has to step in. The groups and nations of the region are going to have to work it out. The sooner there is no Uncle Sam leading, they'd have to learn to cooperate, and would be forced to see their own mutual interests. Or kill each other: yes, all out Shiite-Sunni war would dwarf all the current conflagrations.

But the US has almost always made things worse since Vietnam, whenever it intervenes, in the region, or elsewhere. The current proposal is even more flawed than usual: if we destroy ISIL, Assad's forces can fill the vacuum. If we don't, we'll probably rally Sunnis to ISIL's side. US enemies will win, either way. What then? War to accomplish "regime change" in Syria, and maybe Iraq, again?

No action except an arms embargo of the whole region makes much sense. ISIL is (our friend) Iraq's enemy and (our enemy) Syria's enemy. It gains its appeal from the ill-treatment of Sunni Muslims by both governments. Until people in the region learn to live together, instead of killing each other, ISIL, or its successors, may be a problem no outside power can solve.