Over the past year, it has been obvious to most that the US-led campaign against ISIS is heading in the same direction as the war begun in 2001 against the Taliban in Afghanistan: failure. Just as the Taliban were able to regroup and re-attack despite the expenditure of more than $200 billion of coalition military hardware against them, ISIS has not only survived what President Barack Obama promised would be a lethal offensive against them, the terror organisation has continued to hold on to its strongholds, including Raqqa, the “capital” of the “Caliphate” led by Abubakr al Baghdadi. It is extraordinary that a country with a military as seemingly powerful as that run from the Pentagon has thus far been unable to liberate the territories in Iraq and Syria which fell into the control of ISIS over the past year. Every day that ISIS continues to hold on to such territories, hundreds if not thousands of innocent women (including underage girls) get assaulted by the animals in human form who are joining this terror organisation each week, including from within the US and its NATO partners, principally Turkey, the UK and France. The US and its NATO partners may be in agreement with Ankara that ISIS is a lesser evil than the regime in Damascus and therefore are deliberately holding back from a full scope assault on that organisation in Syria, but this does not explain the US failure in Iraq. In this country as well, the US military is demonstrating its incompetence in dealing with threats from terror organisations, with even the US Treasury unable or unwilling to cut off the flow of funds to ISIS and its clones from wealthy backers in Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other countries, including Australia and Canada. Had the US Treasury been as successful in choking of funds to the group as it was in the case of Al Qaeda, by now ISIS would have been forced to withdraw from Iraq and Syria. In the shadow of the patent incapacity of Washington to seriously degrade and destroy the fighting capabilities of ISIS, it is a mystery why a crescendo of voices has arisen within the Obama administration condemning Russia’s initiation of a military assault on ISIS. Barack Obama and David Cameron are plainly happier with ISIS control of territory than they are with space dominated by the Syrian military under the control of Bashar Assad and are therefore plainly holding back from moving seriously against ISIS in locations where the immediate beneficiary of such moves would be the Syrian army rather than “moderate opposition” fighters existing only in the think tanks and policy establishments of NATO. Joining hands with Turkey, France, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in presently seeing Bashar Assad as a greater threat than ISIS, the US and its coalition partners have ensured not only the survival but the growth of ISIS, oblivious to the baleful effect of such a phenomenon on their own security, which did not seem at all affected during the four decades and counting that the Assad family has ruled in Damascus. While the 1980 invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR was unpardonable, the effort by President Vladimir Putin to “degrade and destroy” ISIS (now that the US-led coalition is plainly unable to do the job) is welcome. The howls of protest from Ankara, Paris, London and Washington that are directed at Moscow can only be described as comic.
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