Here We Go Again

Yes, those guys from the Islamic State are truly terrible.  As you may have gleaned from my previous post, I was not terribly impressed by the beheading of those two American journalists — nobody is a war correspondent except by personal choice.  There have been a lot of other beheadings, though.  Every time ISIL overran some Iraqi army position, they sorted out the Shi'a "heretics" and lopped their heads off.  They made pretty convincing attempts at genocide against the Yazidis and the Maronite Christians.  I suppose somebody ought to stop them.

Somehow, though, I don't think the USofA can manage the job.  Yes, I know — we were the ones who broke Iraq, so, supposedly, we bought it.  Maybe it's time, however, to toss the broken pieces in the trash and move on.

Right now, we're arming and training Shite militias that were trying to kill us five years ago.  We're looking for "moderate" Syrian militias to arm and train, although that requires stretching the term "moderate" to include quite a few extremists.  Sadly, we seem pretty inept at the arming and training business, as witnessed by the collapse of the Iraqi army.

Air strikes seem to be the only approach the American public is comfortable with at this stage of the game, and you can't use air strikes without killing a lot of innocents, and radicalizing their friends and relatives.  Let's face it: nobody over there likes us, or really wants our presence.

Politically, though, Obama has to do something, so he will.  But it won't work.