President Obama met with the anti-ISIS coalition’s defense ministers
at Andrews Air Force Base this week. Afterward, he said the 21 member
states agreed that they’re going to defeat ISIS. It sounded great. But
it was a fairy tale.
The only thing the 21-nation coalition agreed on was that nobody is
sending combat forces to defeat ISIS. Some are helping the U.S. bombing
campaign. Some are offering humanitarian assistance. But none are
willing to stand up against ISIS, except the Kurdish Peshmerga, who were
not even invited to the conference.
The Kurds are the only ones in the entire region willing to fight
ISIS, but they’re the only ones in the region we’re not arming. Go
figure.
Let’s face reality. The old Iraq no longer exists. The old
Syria no longer exists. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
The Kurds are fighting to defend their homeland, but they are
seriously outgunned. ISIS has state-of-the-art American equipment it
picked up off the battlefield in June, when the Iraqi army abandoned it
and fled. The Kurds have been promised U.S. equipment for a decade, but
it never got delivered because it was supposed to be a pass-through from
the Iraqi Army. The U.S. sent it; the Kurds never got it.
The Turks, whom we are wooing hard, aren’t taking action against
ISIS. They are using this opportunity to bomb the Kurds, while we look
the other way. If we don’t give the Kurds the means to defend
themselves, we could become a willing bystander to genocide on a mass
scale.
President Obama’s plan to “degrade and defeat ISIS” is barely a month
old, but it has already failed. Even his top military advisers say
ground forces are needed to defeat ISIS, and none of the coalition
members are willing to send ground forces.
The bombing campaign has helped, sort of, but the Sunni ISIS forces
have now advanced east to the suburbs of Shiite-controlled Baghdad, and
north to the Kurdish region. The corrupt and incompetent Iraqi army is
fleeing, once again. The as-yet unformed moderate Syrian rebel army is a
long way off, and in all likelihood a fantasy. ISIS is just outside of
Baghdad, and moving north to the Kurdish region. The president and his
advisers keep saying this will take a long time to win, but time is
running out.
Let’s face reality. The old Iraq no longer exists. The old Syria no
longer exists. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put
Humpty Dumpty together again.
ISIS now controls much of Sunni Iraq and Syria. What remains of the
old Iraq is the Shiite/Baghdad area. Their government has far better
relations with Iran than with us, and the Iraqi military is working
closely with Iranian forces and their Shiite militias.
The Obama plan, now named Inherent Resolve, isn’t working. Time for a new plan.
First, the Kurds deserve to survive. They are wildly pro-American.
They are a democracy. They have equal rights for women. They are the
only ones in the region willing to accept Christian, Sunni and religious
minority refugees. They are economically self-sufficient with
considerable oil wealth. They don’t want American combat forces. They
are willing to fight ISIS on their own. They even have a women’s brigade
fighting on the front lines. But they need modern weapons.
Second, it’s time we explain, in the strongest possible terms to
everyone in the region, that they have to stand up to ISIS themselves.
No more hiding behind American forces. We will help with airstrikes and
intelligence, but we will NOT send in combat forces to defend them. For
over a decade they’ve been willing to hold our coats while we’ve done
the bulk of the fighting. Those days are over.
Ten years ago we didn’t have a lot of options. We needed Arab oil. We
had to kill terrorists “over there” so they couldn’t come “over here.”
We had to be involved in the internecine Middle East civil wars. But
things have changed in the last few years. With our new discoveries and
technologies, we now have the ability to be self-sufficient in oil and
natural gas, and even to become energy exporters. We also have new data
mining systems to find and track terrorists. Ten years ago we needed the
Middle East more than it needed us. Now the situation is reversed.
What a needless tragedy. The Iraq War may have been a mistake, but
the surge had it won by 2008. All we had to do was leave some residual
forces in Iraq to keep its politicians on course. But according to his
own Cabinet officers, Obama was so eager to end the Iraq War, at any
cost, that he was willing to end it by losing it; and, of course, to
blame Bush.
Admittedly, there is plenty of blame to go around. We now know Bush
shouldn’t have gone in, and Obama shouldn’t have gone out. But we are
where we are. Operation Inherent Resolve was a failure before it really
got started.
The question is, what does President Obama plan to do next, and when
does he plan to tell the American people about it? Maybe after the
November election?
Kathleen Troia "K.T." McFarland is a Fox News National Security Analyst and host of FoxNews.com's "DefCon 3."
She served in national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan
administrations. She was an aide to Dr. Henry Kissinger at the White
House, and in 1984 Ms. McFarland wrote Secretary of Defense Weinberger's
groundbreaking "Principles of War " speech. She received the Defense
Department's highest civilian award for her work in the Reagan
administration.