That's a curse these days. We're likely to have more asymmetrical warfare like Paris' Friday Night Frights in the years to come. The asymmetrical part needs to be reinforced when you think about what to do about ISIS and its fans.
The West is by and large limited to hitting military targets if they want to at least loosely adhere to international law. ISIS is not so constrained, free to kick the West in the crotch while we're playing by Marquis of Queensberry rules.
That's not to say we need to fight dirty. A daisy cutter in downtown Raqqa would get their attention, but that's not how we roll.
Diplomacy is of little use with ISIS. Having them peacefully settle for ruling eastern Syria and western Iraq and put plans to fight the infidels elsewhere on the shelf isn't going to happen, since Westphalian constructs will see the West failin' to understand where they're coming from. The normal rules of respecting other countries right to exist aren't functioning here, since they see themselves as the rightful and righteous rulers of the world and anyone who doesn't see that is working with the Devil.
This quote from a British Labour MP was cute-"...any military action has to be subordinated to international diplomatic efforts to end the war.” The diplomacy that would work here is to get a variety of players to agree on how to role them back and get them to surrender; diplomacy with ISIS is unlikely to work when their militant us-against-the-world worldview is still intact.
However, bombing the [crap] out of them, as a certain real estate magnate suggested over the weekend, isn't the only answer. Putting the dreaded boots on the ground (someone's boots at least) to control the areas will likely be needed if we want to drain the jihadi swamp (yes, it's a dry area that ISIS controls, so the metaphor isn't all that great) so that the next wave of jihadis don't have a friendly home base.
ISIS can be blamed part on the Iraq war (as unpalatable is it is to say, Saddam would be an improvement to the present unpleasantness), part on the US' withdrawal from Iraq and part on the Arab Spring encouraging the Syrian opposition. ISIS then stepped into the vacuum in Iraq and elbowed the civilized opposition aside in Syria.
We'll need an industrial-strength wet-dry vacuum to clean up the area. However, there isn't much going on at present beyond the aerial whack-a-mole game that the US and its friends have been doing. Russia complicates things in Syria as they back Assad and concentrate their strikes on the civilized opposition, while Turkey is more afraid of the Kurds than ISIS, so the northern and western approaches to ISIS turf are controlled by folks who have ISIS further down on their to-do list..
A concentrated effort to roll back ISIS has those complications and more. There are a lot of geopolitical moving pieces and even more domestic pieces, one of which is having to wrap your mind around ISIS morphing from a regional terror group to a de-facto nation with fifth columns across the west, one of which we saw in action Friday night.
Even if we declared all-out war on ISIS and ran them out of Dodge, those fifth columns are still in place, with reinforcements moving in from the region as we speak. Neutralizing those western Muslims who might be inspired by ISIS is a dicey proposition, where our sense of fair play will run counter to wanting to tamp down the fifth-column threat. That proposition is made even dicier by folks on the left who bend over backwards to avoid noting that the "war on terror" is against radical manifestations of Islam and not against asymmetrical warfare techniques.
The first four columns of Daesh will be a hard-nut to crack as well, likely requiring something resembling nation-building (or at least trashing the current nation bedeviling us) that Americans have lost the taste for. Whether we'll regain it out of necessity is an open question; that's another post that is forthcoming in the hours to come.
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