Secretary of State John Kerry’s Unfortunately Ridiculous Strategic Justification — for Letting the Syrian City of Kobane Potentially Fall to ISIL — When We Act Brain Dead, it Would Be Better to Hide (Not Trumpet) the Fact

09 October 2014

The vacuity of the Obama Administration’s pretended strategy against ISIL vividly showed up yesterday

In a way that should make virtually anybody (who is not naive) chuckle cynically.

Stylistic disclaimer

Below, I put too many words between quotation marks to be stylistically pleasing. I left them in because:

In some instances the treatment indicates slang or metaphorically meant semantics.

In others, the marks designate what I consider to be universally used politicized jargon.

And sometimes the enclosure simply makes deciphering the intent of the passage easier.

Background

Let’s start with ISIL’s access to tanks:

The United States has determined that Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was building an armored force.

Officials said the U.S. intelligence community detected a presence of U.S. and Russian-origin armored vehicle platforms at ISIL facilities in northern Iraq.

The officials said the platforms included armored personnel carriers, main battle tanks and armored combat vehicles.

This goes to show what happens, when the United States funnels too many weapons into wrong or weak hands.

University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole addressed part of the aftermath

In the Syrian-Turkish border city of Kobane:

Ismat Sheikh, commander of the Kurdish forces at the border town of Kobane (Ain al-Arab) that is besieged by ISIL tanks and artillery, says that he expects massacres of its inhabitants if it falls to the Sunni Arab extremists.

He warned that ISIL fighters are less than a mile from his front line.

Despite US air strikes, ISIL has drawn up some 25 tanks and a number of artillery pieces to pound Kobane repeatedly.

The only “boots on the ground” in anti-ISIL opposition are comprised of the inferiorly armed Kurdish People’s Protection Units (usually referred to as the “YPG”):

The U.S.-led coalition stepped up airstrikes around the Syrian border town of Kobane on Tuesday after Turkey appealed for help, enabling Kurdish fighters to reverse the advance of Islamic State militants for the first time since the extremists launched their assault about three weeks ago.

The strikes followed the request by Turkey for intensified U.S. efforts to prevent the predominantly Kurdish town, known as Ayn al-Arab in Arabic, from falling to the Islamic State, Turkish officials said.

Turkey has lined up tanks and troops within view of the Syrian Kurdish fighters defending Kobane but has not sought to intervene — for a tangle of reasons bound up with its complicated relationship with Kurds and its doubts about the goals of the international coalition fighting the extremists.

Turkey insisted, however, that it does not want the town to fall, and a senior official said Ankara asked the United States on Monday to escalate strikes.

Media videos (which I have not been able to relocate after seeing them on television) show Turkish tanks sitting idly on the Syrian border.

They are there, it seems, to make sure that the independence-minded Kurds on both sides of the border do not cause secession problems in Turkey:

Islamic State fighters launched a renewed assault on the Syrian city of Kobane on Wednesday night, and at least 21 people were killed in riots in neighbouring Turkey where Kurds rose up against the government for doing nothing to protect their kin.

In Turkey, street battles raged between Kurdish protesters and police across the mainly Kurdish southeast, in Istanbul and in Ankara, as fallout from war in Syria and Iraq threatened to unravel the NATO member's own delicate Kurdish peace process.

The street violence was the worst Turkey has seen in years.

Thus, we have Turkey calling on America to do something — and the United States calling on its “coalition” to do something . . .

And the (apparently under-weaponed) Kurds doing the only real fighting.

Enter Secretary of State John Kerry — with his attempt to “doublespeak” reality

To wit:

If Kobani fell to ISIL, the armed group would be in control of more than half of Syria's 820 kilometre border with Turkey.

But US Secretary of State John Kerry said the loss of the town would not be a strategic defeat.

As the United Kingdom’s Independent reported it:

Speaking tonight, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, suggested that preventing the fall of Kobani was not a strategic US objective.

“As horrific as it is to watch in real time what is happening in Kobani, you have to step back and understand the strategic objective,” he said.

“Notwithstanding the crisis in Kobani, the original targets of our efforts have been the command and control centres, the infrastructure.”

In other words, ground reality does not matter, in so long as we can spin the illusion of having “them guys” by their neural “nads”.

A predominantly probably ineffectual strategy — against an enemy not likely to support its contextually misapplied presumptions

The gist of what follows is that strategies have to be appropriate to the character of one’s adversary. Ours against ISIL, as it seems to have been expressed by Secretary Kerry, is not.

The US Air Force’s ideas about the interdiction of command and control foci were strengthened by American experience in the Gulf War and years later in the preliminary take down of all of Iraq.

These concepts are based on the accurate insight that modern militaries are dependent on electronic and satellite nets somewhat similar to the human nervous system. If “we” take those out, our adversary presumably will not be able to control its cooperating “limbs” quickly enough to respond to our forces’ advances.

The presumption underlying the “break the nerve net” strategy, of course, is that our adversaries’ electronic centers are evolved to the ballpark degree that ours are.

Unfortunately (for us), ISIL and every one of our “terrorist” and “insurgent” adversaries from Vietnam onward have not been characterized by such a technologically imposed weakness.

In fact, the prime cause of our difficulties in defeating our recent “asymmetric” adversaries is their refusal to fall victim to the openings that technologically modernized centralization brings with it. Press reports, for example, already indicate that ISIL abandons electronic communication, when using it proves lethal. Just as the Taliban did in Afghanistan.

In truth, our Gulf and Iraq War experiences should have demonstrated that it is easy to defeat electronically dependent militaries, but not to defeat the determined insurgent “rabble” that later scoots in to make the occupier’s life miserable.

In Secretary Kerry’s statement yesterday, the US (again) appears to have taken the wrong lesson from its immediate past.

A strategically broader point

The reality (in any war against a determined and numerically significant opponent) is that you cannot “win” — in the way that American leadership typically defines it — unless you control the ground.

The fall of Kobane, if it occurs, will become a symbolic victory for ISIL in its recruitment effort.

Calling it anything else is American doublespeak that is intended to camouflage a frankly imbecilic, decades-long, failed foreign policy.

This is not, in fairness, predominantly President Obama’s fault

One can legitimately argue that he was handed a “doomed to fail” card set after President George W. Bush had impetuously finished removing a key anti-chaos structure in the Middle East — namely Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-governed Iraq.

The moral? — When our leaders make themselves look like fools, they diminish the appearance of competence that Government needs to properly perform

Secretary of State John Kerry and the Obama Administration have chosen a difficult path to negotiate (pun intended).

Committed to generating the illusion of doing something against ISIL (as they apparently are), they had better not get caught looking glaringly ineffectual and profoundly dumb at the same time.

I am not here arguing that ISIL is the threat to the United States that the Administration (contrafactually) purports it to be.

But I am saying — when we pretend that something is a threat — we had better act as if it is and implement effective methods to control it. Otherwise, we look simultaneously helpless and stupid. Seeing a blindly blundering colossus publicly stumble around has got to encourage our present and future adversaries.

For that reason, it is sometimes best to downplay “difficult to deal with” threats early, so as not to be later dragged into conceptual boxes from which it is impossible to escape.

Rather than declaring ISIL to be the Terrorist of Millennium (or even the Month), it would have been better to deal with the “problem” as yet another “burble” in the chronically simmering intransigence that the US helped create in the Middle East and elsewhere.

When framed this understated way, global expectations are not high and US mistakes can be subsequently downplayed as:

Well, that reverse was just another speed bump in the chronic, day to day management of one of many global problems. No big deal.

In contrast, Secretary Kerry’s “blow off Kobane” statement tacitly accepts:

(a) the immensity of the Administration’s characterization of the ISIL threat,

but, in the same paragraph,

(b) proposes a strategy that we easily recongize cannot work — because its underlying premises are so obviously misapplied in the applicable context.

In other words, the worst of both worlds.

Though I empathize with the President’s inconceivably difficult job, I do wonder why his Administration is so easily flummoxed by foreseeable problems with its chosen semantics and alleged “strategies”.

There is nothing inherent in the messes that we created in the Middle East and Afghanistan that requires us to make them noticeably worse. Or that demands that we look even stupider “now” than we did “then”.

PeteFree.com

Secretary of State John Kerry’s Unfortunately Ridiculous Strategic Justification — for Letting the Syrian City of Kobane Potentially Fall to ISIL — When We Act Brain Dead, it Would Be Better to Hide (Not Trumpet) the Fact