Obama
Is Picking Targets in Iraq and Syria While Missing the Point.
US officials have big
disagreements
about how dangerous ISIS is, and whether bombing will hurt it or
help it.
The question is confused because the term "bombing" fails to
distinguish between air strikes on troops engaged in battle and drone
assassinations, but this distinction is crucial. Tactical air support
focuses on heavy weapons and military vehicles, and it is easy to
distinguish them from civilians. People don't have heavy weapons or
HUMVs at home, even in Iraq. Thus, air support causes few civilian
casualties, and those few, when they occur, are understandable.
By contrast,
drone
assassinations often kill civilians in their homes and cars; in
Pakistan and Yemen, those casualties, coming literally and
figuratively out of the blue, have inspired understandable lasting
hatred against the US.
For the moment, the US campaign against ISIS is mostly air support for
the armies fighting ISIS. I'm in favor of providing such support. We
see already that it is effective: it has prevented ISIS from
conquering thousands of people and likely butchering them wholesale.
It has also resulted in rather easy recapture of substantial
territory, a vital dam, and some towns. As long as ISIS maintains
armies fighting in the field, fighting them this way will be effective
for the same reasons.
But Obama's speech shows he envisions continuing the fighting into a
drone assassination campaign. A proper debate must treat those as two
separate issues.
A drone assassination campaign in Iraq would be self-defeating as well
as unjustifiable. Iraqi Sunnis would form ranks behind ISIS in
response to the civilian casualties, producing a stalemate of
suffering like that in Yemen. Such a stalemate never leads to
victory; each day, the US would face the choice to terminate it and
lose, or continue it and cause additional pointless suffering to
preserve the status quo.
When Congress debates fighting ISIS, as is its duty, it must
distinguish these two forms of fighting. If I were a member of
Congress, I would vote for air support on the battlefield, for as long
as ISIS keeps fighting on battlefields, but insist on prohibiting
assassination campaigns.