{"id":141717,"date":"2014-11-10T16:53:59","date_gmt":"2014-11-10T16:53:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=141717"},"modified":"2014-11-10T16:53:59","modified_gmt":"2014-11-10T16:53:59","slug":"possibly-go-right-four-months-iraq-war-3-0-cracks-showing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/possibly-go-right-four-months-iraq-war-3-0-cracks-showing\/","title":{"rendered":"What Could Possibly Go Right? Four Months Into Iraq War 3.0, the Cracks Are Showing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Van Buren<\/em><\/p>\n

Karl von Clausewitz<\/a>, the famed Prussian military thinker, is best known for his aphorism \u201cWar is the continuation of state policy by other means.\u201d But what happens to a war in the absence of coherent state policy?<\/p>\n

Actually, we now know. Washington\u2019s Iraq War 3.0, Operation Inherent Resolve, is what happens. In its early stages, I asked sarcastically, \u201cWhat could possibly go wrong?<\/a>\u201d As the mission enters its fourth month, the answer to that question is already grimly clear: just about everything. It may be time to ask, in all seriousness: What could possibly go right?<\/p>\n

Knowing Right from Wrong<\/strong><\/p>\n

The latest American war was launched as a humanitarian mission. The goal of its first bombing runs was to save the Yazidis, a group few Americans had heard of until then, from genocide at the hands of the Islamic State (IS). Within weeks, however, a full-scale bombing campaign was underway against IS across Iraq and Syria with its own \u201ccoalition of the willing\u201d and 1,600 U.S. military personnel on the ground. Slippery slope? It was Teflon-coated. Think of what transpired as several years of early Vietnam-era escalation compressed into a semester.<\/p>\n

And in that time, what\u2019s gone right? Short answer: Almost nothing. Squint really, really hard and maybe the \u201cgood news\u201d is that IS has not yet taken control of much of the rest of Iraq and Syria, and that Baghdad hasn\u2019t been lost. These possibilities, however, were unlikely even without U.S. intervention.<\/p>\n

And there might just possibly be one \u201cvictory\u201d on the horizon, though the outcome still remains unclear. Washington might \u201cwin\u201d in the IS-besieged Kurdish town of Kobane, right on the Turkish border. If so, it will be a faux<\/em>victory guaranteed to accomplish nothing of substance. After all, amid the bombing and the fighting, the town has nearly been destroyed<\/a>. What comes to mind is a Vietnam War-era remark<\/a> by an anonymous American officer about the bombed provincial capital of Ben Tre: \u201cIt became necessary to destroy the town to save it.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than 200,000 refugees have already fled Kobane, many with doubts that they will ever be able to return, given the devastation. The U.S. has gone to great pains to point out just how many IS fighters its air strikes have killed there. Exactly 464<\/a>, according to a U.K.-based human rights group, a number so specific as to be suspect, but no matter. As history suggests, body counts in this kind of war mean little.<\/p>\n

And that, folks, is the \u201cgood news.\u201d Now, hold on, because here\u2019s the bad news.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Van Buren Karl von Clausewitz, the famed Prussian military thinker, is best known for his aphorism \u201cWar is the continuation of state policy by other means.\u201d But what happens to a war in the absence of coherent state policy? Actually, we now know. Washington\u2019s Iraq War 3.0, Operation Inherent Resolve, is what happens. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":134122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-141717","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-war-terrorism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}