I hate to sound negative, but there is just no way Prez Obama’s publicly proclaimed project to destroy ISIS/ISIL or whatever is going to work in theory or in practice. It makes no sense. It is convoluted and an embarrassment. (See below.) 

My guess is that, at the end of the day, it will revert to a modified, super-charged drone war, a tactic which Washington has employed for years in the inaccessible outbacks of Pakistan. 

The Cheney/Bush/Obama White House has arrogated to itself the prerogative to overfly any country in the Middle East and beyond, and to kill with impunity anybody it deems a threat to national security, often when those threats were created and nurtured by the White House itself to begin with, for reasons which are best left unexplained for the present.

Patrick

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http://news.antiwar.com/2014/09/14/iraqi-president-no-need-for-arab-nations-to-strike-isis/

Iraqi President: No Need for Arab Nations to Strike ISIS

The Obama Administration’s efforts to cobble together a coalition of nations for the new war on ISIS has netted a handful of Sunni Arab nations willing to conduct airstrikes inside Iraq, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and by some accounts Egypt.

The big problem is that no one asked the Iraqis if they were okay with this, and President Fuad Massoum today made clear that the Iraqi government considers such nations “unnecessary,” which is a polite way of saying extremely unwelcome.

It’s not hard to imagine why, as the Shi’ite dominated Iraqi government, allied with Iran, is not on the best of terms with the Sunni Arab world, and having those nations’ warplanes looming overhead is going to be problematic for Shi’ite leaders.

President Massoum is a Kurd, however, so it is rather surprising that he would be the one vocalizing government disquiet about the US moves to include such nations in the strikes, without consulting the Iraqi government.

Massoum’s comments came in an exclusive interview with the Associated Press, in which he also expressed “regret” that the US was not allowing Iran, the primary nation currently involved in the fight against ISIS in Iraq, to even attend the coalition meeting in Paris.

France had similarly said they wanted to invite Iran to the coalition meeting, though the US insisted it was “not appropriate” to include them. It was seen at the time as a concession to the Sunni Arab nations which the US has been so desperate to include, but seems to be putting the coalition on a rather sectarian-looking footing to the Iraqis, and an unwelcome one at that.

Ever since putting itself on the path to a new war in Iraq, the US has been eager to put on the show of a broad “coalition,” even if it meant many of those coalition members weren’t doing anything. Keeping the Iraqi government more or less on board seems to have fallen by the wayside in favor of getting more members, which is making the US intervention far less comfortable for all involved.

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