Oct. 7, 2014 by Darius
News reports today indicate that the battle between ISIS fighters and Kurdish forces for the town of Kobani is approaching a resolution: ISIS will take the town. For weeks now, ISIS has surrounded the town from three sides and been bombarding it with heavy artillery. Isn’t this exactly what US intervention was supposed to stop?
At the start of the US intervention, as Obama assembled a coalition to go into Iraq (third time’s the charm), he vowed to “degrade and destroy” ISIS. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I would have guessed that it would start by degrading and destroying ISIS’s capability to conduct a large-scale military offensive in the face of major armed resistance. Bombing ISIS’s Islamic law center in Raqqa is all well and good, but might it not have been prudent to take out ISIS’s tanks attacking Kobani some time as well?
I don’t really see the difficulty here. How hard it is to see a tank or artillery unit outside Kobani, make two phone calls to verify that it doesn’t belong to the Turkish military (which sits literally a few hundred yards away) or the Kurdish forces, and then drop a Hellfire missile on it??
What’s the point of assembling a grand international coalition if you’re not going to use it in defense of the people fighting ISIS on the ground?
Not What You Might Think 
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