Battle Plan To Defeat ISIS

  1- Bring back General David Petraeus, architect of the Iraq Surge. He knows Mosul like the back of his hand and he knows…

2- The Sunni Tribes, which must again be financially and politically seduced, as they were by Petraeus the last time around during the Surge.

3- ISIS-Occupied Mosul must be cut off by a vastly extended air campaign that makes Mosul inaccessible to ISIS reinforcement. No military traffic however slight can be permitted night or day. Oil pipelines should be blown. Oil trucks should be included on the target lists.

4- The Kurds must be lavishly equipped with Western armaments and a plethora of US Special Operators and advisors.

5- The Shiite-dominated Iraqi militias and Iraqi Army divisions must be instructed that any and all violations of Sunni civilian rights will be punished. They should also be essentially led by US operatives.

6- Saudi Arabia and Jordan must field an expeditionary Sunni ground force, perhaps a brigade that is assigned a specific geographic sector of the Mosul front line.

7- By the way, where are our good friends the British and French so far in this fight? The president must call them out for failing to provide substantial military help despite fact that Britain and France are two prime providers of Islamic extremist fighters.

8- Once Mosul falls, and it will fall, Raqqa Syria and other ISIS held areas of Iraq and Syria must get a similar treatment, one by one. Isolation. Degradation. Conquest.

9- Turkey must be told unequivocally that the international community knows that Turks are tacitly allowing recruits to pass through Istanbul to go on to ISIS in Syria. Turkey must know that full membership in Europe requires Turkey to decide whether they want to live up to the modern state envisioned by Ataturk or just be another stumbling neo-religious confederation.

10- While I do not support a major escalation of our ground force commitment, it is childish and counter-productive to place limits in advance on the commanders ability to bring in American forces and private security forces to shape this battlefield.

11- Any financial institution or state shown to be doing business with ISIS must be severely punished.

12- The US must lead the effort to reconcile Syria’s civil war. That means we must reach out to Iran and Russia whose interests coincide with ours in Syria.

13- Preferably killed, but if captured, ISIS operatives who perpetrated violence against Americans must stand trial in federal court, not Guantanamo.