The New Atlas: US Striking Islamic State "Leaders" is Meaningless, Superficial Amid a War Meant to Last
"Striking at the Islamic State's leadership is perhaps the very
least the United States can do without doing nothing at all. Alleged
"leaders" operating out in the field can
be easily replaced through the same pipeline of men and materiel that
has snaked through the Persian Gulf States, Turkey and Jordan and into
Syria since at least as early as 2011. This pipeline includes training
not only for Islamic State militants, but also for its leadership, just
like any army.
The only way
to truly defeat the Islamic State is to find the source of these
various pipelines, expose them and eliminate them just as the Allies did
to the Axis' industrial and economic bases to win the war. The only
logical conclusion one can draw from a US-led coalition that refuses to
do this in regards to the Islamic State is that the coalition has no
honest intention of truly fighting and defeating the terrorist
organisation to begin with and is merely cynically using its presence in
Iraq and Syria to justify an otherwise unjustifiable, permanent
presence of Western military forces in and around the region. "
