War On Terror: While hitting a truck here or a tank there, the administration blows another chance to shatter Islamic State forces in open country as they plant their black flags on NATO's doorstep in the Kurdish city of Kobani.
We have commented before on the administration's video-game air campaign against ISIS, designed to score points with the electorate even as ISIS relentlessly advances.
CNN reports that over the weekend "allied airstrikes destroyed two ISIS tanks, a bulldozer and another ISIS vehicle," likely one of those white pickup trucks ISIS is fond of. We're sending expensive high-tech fighters to fire laser-guided weapons at solitary bulldozers. This is beyond pathetic.
A week ago we warned of the Islamic State advance on Kobani, and the desperate pleas from the Kurds for something more than token airstrikes as they struggled to survive an ISIL onslaught complete with tanks, armored personnel carriers and even heavy artillery.
It was an advance through the wide-open northern desert of Syria that could have been stopped with a sustained around-the-clock air campaign that targeted more than bulldozers.
It would have been a shooting gallery for our B-1 and B-2 bombers. Even a single B-52 might have done more to "degrade and destroy" advancing ISIS forces in one pass than we have accomplished since Obama's anemic air campaign began.
Now it may be too late to do anything as house-to-house fighting in Kobani is under way.
As with the ISIS advance to the gates of Baghdad in Iraq, the siege of Kobani is no sudden thing. We watched ISIS prepare and train long before its black flag flew over Fallujah in January.
The ISIS entry into Kobani occurred after a three-week siege that included a wave of suicide-bomb attacks, according to a posting by Mustafa Ebdi, a Kurdish activist in Kobani, on his Facebook page.
Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in an interview from his home with Capital Download, USA Today's video newsletter series, said it was Obama's failure to pursue an obtainable status of forces agreement with Iraq that "created a vacuum in terms of the ability of that country to better protect itself, and it's out of that vacuum that ISIS began to breed."
As we've noted, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met in May with American diplomats and Gen. Lloyd Austin, head of Central Command, asking the U.S. for the ability to strike ISIL using drones. If that wasn't doable, Maliki said he'd approve U.S. drone or airstrikes.
The plea fell on deaf ears in an administration intent on walking away from its global responsibilities.
"There's going to be a mass slaughter" if Kobani falls to the Islamic State, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Fox News' Neil Cavuto. "There will be no greater indication of the ineffectiveness and fecklessness of the air campaign we're now seeing."
And President Obama, selecting ineffective targets from his golf cart, will have the best seat in the house.
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"It would have been a shooting gallery" Well, does it not occur to anyone that, for whatever hidden agenda, the administration does not want to destroy them "too" much? "Divide et impera" seems to be that strategy that the Romans used and that Obama uses, for whatever long-term end goal, too.
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