After weeks of hyping their planned “spring offensive” against ISIS in Iraq, capped off with the capture of the major city of Mosul, the Pentagon is now said to have taken the plan entirely off the table on the grounds that Iraqi troops probably wouldn’t win.
“We don’t want to do anything until they are ready and can win decisively,” one Pentagon official explained, “they cannot now.” Apparently, Centcom announced the intention to carry out this attack before considering if it was winnable.
The Centcom announcement was met with a flurry of opposition from Iraqi and Kurdish officials, who noted they weren’t nearly ready for such a battle. Concern about another massive refugee crisis being created by the attack likely also played a role.
Pentagon officials are now saying that the invasion is being pushed back until at least autumn, though even that is tentative, and likely based on extremely optimistic timetables for getting the Iraqi military back into fighting form.
Not our fight.
I'm betting that they won't be ready in the fall either. They're just stalling until the warmongers in Congress can pressure Obama into sending "boots on the ground" – they might even try to unretire the God of Counterinsurgency because he did such a great job in the past…and their going to need another miracle to get out of this one.
The battle over Mosul isn't really that important- the more important issue is that ISIS isn't necessarily fighting a sort of war over territory. ISIS and it's followers are fighting for an idea, an ideology, and although in practice it's brutal and thuggish and pretty much ever other bad name you could attach to it it's still *their* ideology at work. If ISIS is routed in Mosul or anywhere else it will hurt them manpower- and material-wise, but as we saw with Al_Qaeda it only made them stronger in the long run being seen as THE group standing up to the West. In order to defeat ISIS we have to defeat the IDEA of ISIS and so far we're not making a dent in their growth. In short, just as in Indochina, we may win the battles but winning the war is a far more difficult task, and one that I'm not sure we're up to.