How Obama’s ISIS Strategy Could Be Viewed as Potentially Successful

15 Oct, 2014 by Dave Blount

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Maybe it is premature to call Obama’s ISIS strategy a laughable failure. It may turn out to be quite successful if viewed as a component of a larger strategy — the Cloward–Piven Strategy:

On Saturday, Oct. 4, Day 58 of the American campaign against the Islamic State, U.S. aircraft carried out nine strikes inside Iraq and Syria, destroying two tanks, three Humvees, one bulldozer and an unidentified vehicle. The strikes also hit several teams of Islamic State fighters and destroyed six of their firing positions.

At first glance, that might seem like a lot of damage. Leaving aside the significance of killing Islamic State militants and only looking at equipment, the tanks were worth an estimated $4.5 to $6.5 million apiece and each Humvee cost $150,000 to $250,000, bringing the total value of the equipment destroyed to somewhere between $9.5 and $13.8 million [assuming everything was brand new].

But that’s less impressive when one considers that each U.S. “strike” against the self-proclaimed Islamic State can involve several aircraft and munitions and cost up to $500,000, according to Todd Harrison, an expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based defense think tank.

That means the nine airstrikes cost up to $4.5 million, not counting other expenses involved in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, et cetera. Obama’s pinprick airstrike campaign may be a farce militarily, but it has already cost us up to $1.1 billion since June.

Even more disheartening, most, if not all, of the equipment being destroyed originally came from the United States — which is why we’re able to estimate its worth. It was given to the Iraqi army ahead of the U.S. military’s withdrawal in 2011 and captured by the Islamic State when it advanced into Iraq earlier this year. That means Washington is now spending hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury to destroy Humvees, tanks and other weapons that American taxpayers purchased.

This equipment is in the hands of our enemies as an easily predictable consequence of Obama’s premature pullout of our troops from Iraq.

This is what constitutes a victory in Obama’s joke version of the War on Terror:

Another recent Central Command press release, using a different acronym the militant group is known by, touted the destruction of “an ISIL guard shack” among its victories. The weapon that destroyed the guard shack would have cost tens of thousands of dollars, and would have been dropped by an aircraft that, likewise, cost tens of thousands of dollars to fly.

Even after Obama’s purge of politically unreliable military officers, no expert can be found who believes his air-only excuse for a strategy will succeed military. But it would be interesting to hear from Frances Fox Piven how successful it might be at helping to bankrupt the country.

On a tip from Dan. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.