Syria airstrikes on hold because of intelligence

The Washington Post, by way of the Stars & Stripes reports that the Obama Administration is making excuses about striking ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State targets in Syria. It funny how they charge bullheaded into domestic issues, but when it comes time for foreign policy decisions, they always have an excuse why they can’t act;

American spy agencies have not yet assembled the capabilities that would be needed to target Islamic State leaders and provide intelligence with enough reliability to sustain a campaign of strikes.

“Our intelligence is improving since we began devoting the resources to doing that, but we still have only modest visibility into what is going on in Syria,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

A senior U.S. intelligence official said that “it would probably take some number of months to really build up the necessary intelligence architecture” to expand the U.S. air campaign underway in Iraq against Islamic State positions in Syria. “This is not going to end anytime soon.”

The Obama administration has counted on Predator and Reaper aircraft to carry out hundreds of strikes against al-Qaida targets in Pakistan and Yemen, countries where it has at least tacit permission to fly armed drones. The planes conduct near-constant surveillance over extensive territory in both countries and often spend days tracking targets before a missile launch.

But the use of drones is far riskier in Syria, where the forces of President Bashar Assad guard the country’s airspace with missile batteries and fighter aircraft. The Islamic State seeks to overthrow Assad, and strikes against the group would be in his interest. But allowing American drones to reach cities such as Raqqah — an Islamic State stronghold — would also probably be seen by Assad as a threat, in part because such aircraft could gather valuable intelligence on his forces.

I’m sure Jimmy Doolittle worried about things like intelligence and anti-aircraft fire when he planned his raid on the Japanese mainland.

Obama warned that the United States would be “relentless” in its response. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the Islamic State as “an apocalyptic, end-of-days” organization that cannot be defeated unless it is “addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a nonexistent border.”

You keep using that word “relentless”. I do not think it means what you think it means. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean to sit on your ass and think up excuses to avoid doing what needs to be done.

Category: Terror War