When Will U.S. See that ISIS Is Fighting Total War?

America -- and the rest of the world -- has a problem. It has many faces: radical Islam, Islamic terrorism, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS), etc.

Israel is presently trying to deal with Hamas -- one face of that problem.

Too many Americans seem oblivious.

The real question is how does a civilized people fight an enemy that hides and makes war, fires rockets and stores weapons among the civilians population -- an enemy that sends suicide bombers to indiscriminately kill men, women and children at weddings, funerals and in churches? And in the case of ISIS, how do we deal with an enemy that beheads Christians who refuse to convert to Islam, while seizing cities and towns, wealth and war materiel throughout Iraq and Syria? How do we counterattack a mortal enemy who brags "they are coming for us," without killing innocent men, women and children in the areas that they have captured and in which they are building their strength?

In the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, we find a description of how wars were fought in the Middle East in the time of the prophet Samuel and King Saul, 3,000 years ago.

"Samuel said to Saul, ... Go, now, attack Amalek, and put under the ban everything he has. Do not spare him; kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys."

Three thousand years have now passed, and that is the way wars are still fought in the region. Except for the case of Israel, war in the Middle East, is total war. But if Hamas rockets begin inflicting massive casualties on the Israeli civilian population, Israel will have a choice: respond with total war using overwhelming force to win (regardless of civilian casualties), or lose.

If you doubt that Mid-East war is total war, just look at the slaughter in Syria. No distinction is made between combatants and civilians. All are killed indiscriminately. Here are a few excerpts from a timeline for the Syrian Civil War to illustrate:  http://www.aucegypt.edu/gapp/cairoreview/pages/articledetails.aspx?aid=579



"June 13, 2013: White House announces ... that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons multiple times over the past year....

"July 25, 2013: UN Secretary-General ... says that more than 100,000 people have died in the Syrian conflict.

"August 21, 2013: (T)housands of social media messages report a chemical attack on Damascus suburbs; Western media publish images of bodies of purported victims; opposition accuses Al-Assad regime of toxic gas attack ....

"August 23, 2013: Two car bombings in Tripoli kill at least 42 people.

"January 21, 2014: Guardian and CNN cite a report by former international war crimes prosecutors accusing the regime of the 'systematic killing' of 11,000 detainees ....

"February 1-5, 2014: Barrel bombs reportedly dropped by security forces kill at least 246 civilians in Aleppo."


And if you still have doubts, look at the utter barbarism occurring in what is euphemistically called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Here is an Aug. 11 excerpt from CBN News World  http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2014/August/ISIS-Swallowing-Iraq-Theyre-Beheading-Children-/


"ERBIL, Kurdistan -- Islamic terrorists in Iraq are beheading children and burying people alive, and it won't stop there. They have a message for America: We're coming for you. ... "They say if anyone (doesn't) become like Muslim, 'we're going to kill them, each one, from baby to women to old man.' ...

"ISIS was shooting the kids and people, and they were laying them on the ground and they bring tractors that they drive over them in front of their families ... They take women out of their houses so if a family had three daughters, they would take one. They are using the sword to cut off hand(s) and also beheading other(s) so I don't think this is the behavior of human beings, but wild animals do that."


President Obama has now ordered surgical air strikes to slow the ISIS advance, and to support America's Kurdish allies in northern Iraq. Retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Schaffer appearing on Fox News has called the president's present strategy "a joke." Schaffer has stated his own view: "You've got to make it clear that we are in it to win. ... it has to be very overwhelming. If it were up to me, I would be using B-52s in addition to F-18s."

But it is one thing to use B-52s to attack ISIS fighters in open country; at present it would horrify most Americans to use them to obliterate innocent men, women and children in order to exterminate ISIS forces operating among them.

But now CNN has reported that Iraq's ambassador to the UN has reported to the UN sources that "90 pounds of nuclear materials" have now fallen into ISIS hands. If true, this threatens America directly. This is the stuff from which dirty bombs are made. http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/10/world/meast/iraq-crisis/

At the minute, American public opinion will not allow President Obama to obliterate cities and towns occupied/controlled by ISIS to defeat ISIS. The American public has not been shown the justification for B-52 carpet-bombings likely to kill innocent men, women and children. But if a dirty bomb is detonated in an American city, the justification will be apparent. If that happens, like Israel, we will have a choice: (1) Use overwhelming force to win quickly and minimize long-term casualties, or (2) Fight a limited war against an enemy who is fighting total war against us.

President Obama, quite understandably, doesn't want to use overwhelming force against population centers while he has any other choice. Nevertheless, our president faces the most difficult of challenges: he needs to discern and do what must be done now, must be to avoid a worse war latter.
The hard question is this: Is there any effective way to extirpate terrorists fighting a total from among a civilian population for a president viscerally opposed to deploying ground troops?

Posted Online:  Aug. 22, 2014, 11:00 pm - Quad-Cities Online
by John Donald O'Shea

Copyright 2014
John Donald O'Shea