Hitting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in itS self-declared capital of Raqqa, French war plane steeped up attacks in the wake of Friday’s Paris terrorist attacks killing 129 and injuring scores more. Promising to act “merciless,” French President Francoise Holland promise ISIS attacks would not go unpunished, but the attacks do little to rid the region of the Islamic State. Competing crosscurrents from various Saudi-backed Sunni insurgent groups, seeking to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite Shiite regime, make the recent French assault meaningless, unless it galvanizes a coherent multilateral military response to evict ISIS from strongholds in Iraq and Syria. U.S. officials found out long ago that random bombing campaigns do little to change the ground in the Middle East. Only rooting out ISIS in cities and towns with a multinational ground force would work.
Former President Bill Clinton found out the hard way what happens with throw-away missile strikes, doing next-to-nothing hitting Osama bin Ladens’ terrorist training camps some 100 kilometers from Kabul in 1998. Clinton reacted harshly Aug. 20, 1998 to Bin Ladens’s Aug. 7, 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Firing Cruise missiles at Bin Laden’s terror camps did nothing to prevent the U.S. Cole attack Oct. 12, 2000, killing 17 U.S. sailors in Yemen’s Gulf of Aden or stopping Sept. 11, destroying the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon, killing 2,977 innocent victims. Only after former President George W. Bush took the battle to the enemy did the U.S. develop a counter-terrorism policy with teeth. Bush and his Pentagon-minded VP Dick Cheney saw a military response as the only way to confront the problem.
Friday’s ISIS massacre in Paris reminds the Western Alliance meeting at the G20 conference in Antalya, Turkey today that air strikes have their place but can’t root out terrorist nests in ISIS-controlled towns and cities in Northern Iraq and Syria. France’s stepped up air strikes have already been dismissed by ISIS as a useless exercise, since the group anticipated the strikes, insisting 30 French sorties causes zero casualties. “The first target destroyed was used by Daesh [ISIS] as a command post, jihadist recruitment centre and arms and munitions depot. The second held a terrorist training camp,” said the French Foreign Ministry. Bomb-damage-assement [BDA] tells little about the impact of French bombing missions on ISIS’s command-and-control. Pledging stepped up efforts to deal with ISIS, the G20 promised to step up the fight. Air strikes alone can’t stop ISIS from consolidating territory in Northern Iraq and Syria.
Responding to questions regarding dealing with ISIS Nov. 14 at Democratic Debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) admitted that only a concerted multinational effort can defeat ISIS. Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton repeated Obama’s policy that Mideast countries had to take the lead role. With the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters leading to eventually get back Mosul, it’s unrealistic to think they can go it alone. Russia’s Nov. 30 decision to bomb anti-Assad insurgent group in Syria changes the U.S. regime change policy in Damascus. Russia and Iran, with the help of Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia, are committed to seeing Syrian Presdient Bashar al-Assad stay in power. Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry have spent far too much time calling for regime change in Damascus, without have and coherent Plan B.
Putin, through his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, tried to get Obama and Kerry to see the wisdom of keeping al-Assad in power. They both point to U.S. foreign policy failures in Iraq and Libya, fueling the dreaded power-vacuum spreading terrorism around the region. Only recently have Obama and Kerry hinted that they’d back a coalition-of-the-willing to go after ISIS. “We are confronted with a collective terrorism activity around the world. As you know, terrorism does not recognize any religion, any race any nation, or any country,” said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, pleading with the G20 to consider a new strategy. Attacks in Paris have far-reaching implications for major tourist destinations with youthful Muslim populations sympathetic to ISIS, al-Qaeda and other terror groups promising to liberate disenfranchised youth living in slums with a bleak future.
Throwaway bombing or missile attacks did little to stop Bin Laden from terrorizing the U.S. Stepped up air strikes by the French or U.S. isn’t enough to eventually restore Europe’s global security, reeling from recent attacks causing mayhem in one of Europe’s most beloved capitals. “We stand in solidarity with them [France] in hunting down the perpetrators of this crime and bring them to justice,” said President Barack Obama, repeating the same platitudes that’s left Europe reeling from the Paris terrorist attacks. As Clinton found out in 1998 after Bin Laden’s attacked U.S. embassies in East Africa, air strikes or missile attacks are no substitute for going after terrorists on the ground. Only by purging ISIS from towns and cities in Iraq and Syria can ISIS’s propaganda and recruiting operation be successfully neutralized, reducing chances of future terrorist attacks.
