September 28, 2014
Bombing Jihadis Is Futile – Says Top British General – “Air Attacks Alone Will Never Defeat Them”
In sentiment echoed here across the pond, today’s London Sunday Times is reporting that “the former head of the U.K. military warned this weekend that ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, — will never be defeated by air attacks alone; and, Western governments are wrong to rule out ground troops.” Christina Lamb, Mark Hookham, and Tim Shipman write that “General Lord Richards, who stepped down as the head of U.K.’s military last year, said “a conventional military campaign on the scale of the attack on Saddam Hussein in 2003 — is needed to crush the Islamist extremist group.”
Criticizing the U.S.-led coalition’s reliance on airstrikes, Gen. Richards said, “Ultimately you need a land army to achieve the objectives we’ve set for ourselves — all air [strikes] will do is destroy elements of ISIS — it won’t achieve our strategic goal.” “The only way to defeat ISIS,” he said, “is to take back land they are occupying — which means a conventional military operation. You can’t possibly defeat ISIS by only attacking them from Iraq. How the hell can you win a war, when most of your enemy can end up in a country you can’t get involved in?,” Lord Richards told The London Sunday Times.
“Even if you are successful in Iraq, which I doubt,” he said, “they will just go into Syria; and, what will you have achieved? They will just have tighter lines of communication.” Lord Richards added, “ISIS is not a terrorist organization. It might commit acts of terror; but, it has tanks, artillery, huge wealth, courts, and justice of its own kind, — and, it is administering large areas, so the idea that this can be seen as a counterterrorism campaign is a key error. We have to view it as a conventional campaign, which means you [ultimately] have to have boots on the ground.
The London Sunday Times noted that Lord Richards’s — who’s daughter “is an advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron — said that “Politicians have a tendency think you can sort things out militarily. I’ve always been leery of going to war. Secondly, if I have learnt anything in my 42 years’ military experience, much of it in command, it’s that you don’t do it if you’re not going to do it properly.”
“Attacking ISIL from the air solely above Iraq, is dealing with half the problem — not all of it.” Lord Richards wrote in The Sunday Telegraph. “The U.S. has correctly concluded that carrying the fight against ISIS into Syrian airspace is right; we may yet come to the same conclusion.” he wrote.
“If Parliament has to be recalled — to make that strategic decision, I hope that — that is the last vote for some time, as military operations and tactical decisions cannot be conducted by the occupants of the red and green benches, The Prime Minister, Defense Secretary, and Chiefs of Staff — must act subsequently as they see fit, albeit — keeping Parliament informed.”
Lord Richards may have been reading Col. (ret.) Dave Maxwell’s blog — Informal Institute For National Security Thinkers and Practitioners and a former career Army Special Forces soldier. He has often derided the tendency among many to classify ISIS, or the Islamic State as a terrorist organization. Rather, he argues, as does Lord Richards, that the Islamic State is a much more complex entity — that uses terror tactics as part of its overall campaign to establish an Islamic caliphate in the Fertile Crescent.
The best that POTUS Obama’s current anti-ISIS “strategy” is likely to accomplish is containment; but, not defeat or eradication — IMO. A successful attack here on U.S. soil by the group — would however — profoundly change the calculus, and discussion; and, perhaps be as much of a turning point here in America as Pearl Harbor was under Franklin Roosevelt. let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. V/R, RCP
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