The Bloody Tentacles of ISIS

ISIS shocked the civilized world with its beheadings of civilians who they had held in captivity. Now ISIS is spreading its bloody tentacles in different parts of the world as they quake under the air bombardment from the United States, France, Jordan, et al.
In the last fortnight, they have exploded a bomb over Egypt killing 224 Russians who were returning from vacation in the Sinai. They have detonated bombs in Lebanon targeted at Hezbollah. They are responsible for the horrific suicidal bombings at the soccer stadium in Paris, targeting Parisians at restaurants and slaughtering 89 persons who were patrons of a rock concert. In all of the Paris bombings, 129 were killed, 352 injured and 99 of those are in critical condition.
ISIS is not only raising hell in the Middle East but has assembled a transnational army of religious fanatics who serve as a fifth column in the heartland of Europe and the United States.
As the people of France mourn, the question is what should be the response of the West? Should NATO invade the territory that ISIS controls? Should Russia send in ground troops and join the united front to decimate ISIS? Should the Arab states be the boots on the ground and limit European and United States involvement to air strikes? Is President Obama’s strategy working or is it a failure? Should the U.S. heed the advice of the Senators McCain and Graham and mount a massive invasion of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, similar to the Iraqi invasion in 2003?
President Obama is adamant about not committing the American military to directly topple ISIS from the territory that they occupy in Syria and in Iraq. What are the lessons learned from the Iraqi invasion of 2003?
The U.S. military never found Saddam’s army to be much of a fighting force. The prediction that the American military would be greeted with cheers and adoration was misconceived. America has the military might to take out ISIS but then what? In the same vein, when the American military took out Saddam, the insurgency on the part of Sunni and Shia was deadly and costly. A western occupying army in an Islamic country breeds Islamic nationalism.
The Iraqi invasion shifted the control of state power from Sunni to Shia. In their new found power, the Maliki government alienated the crest fallen Sunni and the Iraqi nations comprised of Kurds, Sunni and Shites began to unravel. The Kurds are essentially autonomous and the Sunni concentrated in Anbar Province lost confidence in the central government. With the departure of American troops, ISIS occupied that vacuum and has sought to consolidate areas of Iraq and Syria where Sunni pre-dominates.
America continues to wage the air war against ISIS and it is painstakingly attempting to put together boots on the ground comprised of Sunni countries to eventually lead the invasion against ISIS. Such a strategy would be more palatable to Sunni who might be alienated from ISIS but would resent western powers in the forefront of an invasion.
The Obama strategy is to weaken ISIS through the air bombardment, cut off supply routes and nullify their access to oil fields from which they derive their revenues. The presumption is that a ground force of indigenous Sunni from the region will develop combat readiness eventually to defeat ISIS on the ground. In the interim, what people fear is ISIS’s mounting capacity to detonate bombs in different parts of the world.
What would be a more potent strategy is for the five permanent members of the Security Council and the non-permanent members to pass a resolution to defeat ISIS. This would necessitate putting together a multi-national force to defeat ISIS and to begin to negotiate for the re-drawing of the map in the Middle East. This peacekeeping force and the five permanent members of the Security Council will have to determine the fate of Bashar al-Assad.
Any occupation of troops in Iraq or Syria should not be an American force but an international force sanctioned by the United Nations.
The ideology of ISIS will not evaporate with the collapse of the regime. That will take years but at least ISIS will be a non-state actor that is on the run and would not be an entity in control of territory. That would limit ISIS’s destructive capability.
The horror that took place in Paris on Friday, November 13 should not send Americans into a state of panic. In contemporary America, there is always a penchant for a quick fix. A quick fix would bring a sizeable quantity of American casualties and provide the opportunity for the ISIS propaganda machine to appeal to Sunni ultra-nationalism and make the case to fight the infidels in a new jihad.
The disaffected Muslims living in the belly of western civilization constitute a real threat and are in a position, as we witnessed in Paris, to create mayhem. The vast majority of Muslims in America are loyal to the Republic. They must create an ethos in their respective communities to make it nigh impossible for jihadists to fester.