Why Bombing to Win in Iraq Will Fail

Why Bombing to Win in Iraq Will Fail

08/12/14

Theo Milonopoulos

Military Strategy, Security, The Presidency, Iraq, United States

"The inability of the president to articulate such a vision to the American people suggests he may not have one."

In a sun-drenched Rose Garden address the day rebels assassinated Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011, President Barack Obama touted the successes of the NATO-led air campaign that achieved its objectives “without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground.”

Three years after what one Obama adviser celebrated as a successful illustration of the president’s preference for “leading from behind,” Tripoli’s short-lived democratic regime has returned to the hands of Gaddafi loyalists and begun brutal crackdowns as the nation became overrun by extremists who successfully stormed a U.S. compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, and killed four Americans, including one of the nation’s most distinguished diplomats.

This fate will befall Iraq if President Obama believes that America’s presence in Baghdad can be limited to “targeted” air strikes against carefully selected affiliates of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a protomilitary terrorist organization, whose cunning strategy and brutal tactics are so vile that even Al Qaeda refuses to affiliate itself with its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

History has consistently demonstrated that relying on air power alone ensures that American military campaigns not only fail to accomplish their strategic objectives, but ultimately prove counterproductive in complex operational environments like the one confronting the U.S. military advisors deployed to Iraq in June.

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-bombing-win-iraq-will-fail-11057