US Claims They’re Winning ISIS War

With most of the Paris summit on the ISIS war in Iraq focusing on just how bad the conflict is going, Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, the US representative at the meeting, seemed to remain in denial about the problems, insisting the US is winning the war against ISIS.

That’s been the official US position all along, and it gets reiterated all the more often the more obvious it gets that ground is being lost to ISIS forces. The loss of Ramadi, a city of 500,000 people and capital of Iraq’s largest province, is the latest evidence the war is being lost.

Blinken insists that the US has always had the “winning strategy” in the war, backing Iraq with huge amounts of military aid and providing air strikes. During today’s summit, the US and other nations agreed to even more shipments of aid to Iraq, including anti-tank missiles.

So far, however, those shipments to Iraq’s military tend to end up getting left behind in defeats, and the US airstrikes have centered around destroying US-made vehicles that ISIS has looted from Iraqi forces in the fall of Mosul and other major cities.

While this is clearly just funneling more arms to ISIS and fueling more airstrikes, officials don’t seem to have any better ideas, and seem to be determined to continue the war, no matter how bad of an idea it is.