Behold:
Still, military officers backed Gen. Dempsey’s assessment, arguing that if Ramadi does fall it won’t expose a weakness in the current U.S. campaign of airstrikes but merely highlight how Iraqi forces must refocus their efforts in Anbar.
The failure of American air power to be decisive around Ramadi shows us that Iraq's ground forces aren't worthy of our splendid air power that continues to perform splendidly?
How splendid for us.
This is kind of back assward, isn't it?
The point of air power in Iraq is to help Iraqi ground forces achieve their ground objectives.
It is beyond stupid to suggest that when the Iraqi troops we are supposed to be helping defend Ramadi crack and run under assault by ISIL that we can still take comfort in the fact that our sortie rate is still right up there where we planned it to be.
And have we shown you our PowerPoint presentation on enemy things destroyed and bad people killed lately?
Say! We do have a BS PowerPoint presentation by CENTCOM farcically trying to prove that we've already pushed ISIL out of over 25% of the territory they once controlled since August 2014, right before we intervened!
Mind you, I'm no fan of Bill Arkin. And I'm not ready for a blanket condemnation of CENTCOM--they must (as they should) follow civilian instructions.
But the notion that we are driving back ISIL and we're 25% of the way to ejecting ISIL from Iraq is nonsense. If you didn't see this claim in the news recently it may be because even our inept reporting class that knows little about military matters wasn't fooled by this claim.
So don't you worry about the fall of Ramadi! It's a negative rounding error in our tide of driving ISIL back!
And don't you worry that the fall of Ramadi might allow Iran to crow about how American air power is insufficient when compared to the on-the-ground help of Iran for defeating ISIL. Oh no! That wouldn't be sporting of them at all.
Remember, the sooner we cripple ISIL in Iraq, the sooner we can restrain and disband the pro-Iranian Shia militias that have expanded to make up for the decline in Iraqi regular military power.
The Stupid seems more contagious than Ebola these days.
UPDATE: Related.
