IF IT’S A NO-STRATEGY STRATEGY…
(…it makes it seem like Nero’s fiddling while Rome burned…)

After three useless ventures as nation-building artistes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, with less than glorious outcomes, America now faces the prospect of yet another round of some kind of military engagement to clean up the collateral mess those ventures left behind, and also, to somehow maintain some semblance of order in an otherwise perennially disordered region of the world.

Frankly, it’s the kind of “policing” role most Americans are tired of performing for the rest of the world community, especially since most of it has neither the means nor the will to do it for itself, while we have wasted too many young American lives, time, effort, and national treasure, to supposedly “help” those who seem hell-bent on killing each other and trashing their countries back into the stone age for no good reasons. All of which probably best explains the President’s reluctance to become more pro-actively engaged in the current crisis with ISSIS in Iraq and Syria. So, if this makes his no-strategy strategy seem like Nero’s fiddling while Rome burned, he’s really just reflecting America’s mood today. It’s just damn sick and tired of being the world community’s only police force.

Unfortunately, ISSIS, is the unintended consequence of our own and the world community’s failure to intervene into the Syrian civil war when doing so could have avoided the resulting petri-dish of chaos and conflicting interests, which created a power vacuum there which thus allowed ISSIS to evolve into the cancerous form we see today (as the President has called it). Yet, it has become much more than just being a cancer. It has morphed itself from being a nasty sectarian virus into an extremely venomous snake. A snake which cannot be dealt with by piecemeal, incremental tactics against it, but rather, requires strategic strikes at its head, which is in Syria…not Iraq…and that’s the rub, because, to do so, we run into the question of Syrian sovereignty.

In the context of the actual realities in Syria today, however, such diplomatic niceties and concerns about that “sovereignty” are irrelevant if not absurd. No “sovereignty” has existed there for the past three years, and even less so today, because Syria has become a failed state whose erstwhile territory is now a free-fire zone, where floods of desperate people keep seeking refuge or shelter in any safe-haven they can find, from the criminal assaults of the Assad regime’s military thugs, on one hand, or from the un-tender mercies of one kind of armed gang or another, on the other, from which ISSIS has emerged as the dominant one because of its merciless applications of terror tactics…extortion…murder…pillage… and rape, to achieve that dominance and self-proclaimed “sovereignty” over whatever territory it can hold with its guns.

So now it’s time to face that reality and call it what it really is…an international criminal organization…rivaling anything yet seen, to call upon the entire world community to declare it as such, and then go after it on that basis. Anything less just won’t work. It will require a concerted effort, militarily, technologically, diplomatically, and financially, to achieve any effective results. Among other things there are three key elements required for that to be effective. These are:

1. An immediate imposition of a no-fly-no-cross-no-fire zone running from the Mediterranean, just west of Aleppo, to the Syrian-Iraqi border, to create that missing “safe-haven” east of it. A safe-haven where the legitimate opposition to the Assad regime could have a chance to consolidate and organize itself into a viable potential alternative to the Assad regime. Concurrently, the millions of Syrians now refugees in neighboring countries would then have reason to return to help re-establish a stable and civil society for themselves. It would also allow NGO humanitarian organizations to provide much more effective aid and assistance for these, behind such a secure cover. Of course, the only power able to provide such cover at this time is America, and, for once, perhaps its drone technologies can really be put to constructive use for that purpose. Meanwhile, air strikes against ISSIS elements in Iraq should continue to be applied to decimate as many of its armed elements there as possible, providing Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces the means to mop up any of those left.
   
2. Inside Syria, west of such a no-fly zone, where ISSIS facilities, communications, and command and control networks might be intermingled among civilian non-combatants, instead of firepower, EMP technologies could be applied, to destroy its assets without impacting on such civilians. Such EMP strikes would disrupt vehicular, radio, telephonic, and internet functions, further weakening its abilities to operate or control its units and territory.
   
3. Lastly, activate a very concentrated effort to disrupt its network of international private and state-provided funding sources and armament suppliers. These should be publicly identified regardless of whom it might embarrass by such efforts. Perhaps even some form of sanctions, diplomatic or otherwise, could be applied to any who don’t cease and desist from supporting ISSIS.
   

If this is what the President means by a no-strategy strategy…it just might do the job.

CENTURION