On cutting the crap, breaking the Caliphate’s back, and focusing on America

Non-Intervention ^ | 11/18/2015 | Michael Scheuer 

Honoring Paris’s dead and wounded is now being done with crocodile tears, candles, moments of silence, crowds of strangers holding hands, pledges of solidarity, the endless, pro forma singing of national anthems, and bouquets of followers mounded up as colorful, if wilting, temples to the dead.
None of this nonsense honors anyone, it is simply another meaningless iteration of the made-for-TV, post-Islamist-attack “Festival of the Dead”, an event to which Westerners seem to be intensely attached and are now institutionalizing. After all, it’s a chance to get outdoors, walk a bit, and mingle with other self-professed and mourning lovers of humanity. It is, in fact, all hogwash. It allows Western people to feel they have done something to contribute to victory over the enemy when in fact they have done less to honor the dead and destroy their killers than their national governments — and that truly is quite an underachievement.
But there is a time-honored and effective way to honor the Paris dead, as well as the U.S. and Western soldiers whose lives and limbs have been wasted since 2001 by national leaders who did not intend to win. If the United States and the West really do not want to do the smartest thing and encourage a Sunni-Shia sectarian war, then it has the near-term option of destroying all those facilities in Syria and Iraq that are essential to the Islamic State’s effort to build a state or, in their words, rebuild the Caliphate.
Currently, IS is in possession of:
–Highways and bridges –Portions of a railway system –Fleets of tanker trucks, construction vehicles and machinery, and farming equipment –Cell phone tower networks and overhead power lines –Improved waterways and irrigation canals/systems –Potable water and urban sanitation systems –Hydroelectric dams and reservoirs –Airfields –Grain silos –Mills for processing wheat and other grains –Facilities for mining minerals –Oil fields, wells, and refineries –Gas fields, wells, and distribution systems –Pipelines for fuel, gas, and water –Factories, government buildings, warehouses, and military bases –Farmland that is growing crops –Hospitals –Universities –Police stations, military barracks, office buildings, and hotels that are used to store arms and house fighters
Each of these things, needless to say, is part of the IS military effort. They are even more important, however, to its effort to build a state, fund an economy, attract foreign volunteers, and feed, employ, and care for a population. They all are also wonderfully visible, cannot be readily moved or hidden, and are just the kind of targets that Western air forces can annihilate in an air campaign of relatively short duration. For the first time since 1996, the Islamists have acquired a large and valuable set of physical assets that they cannot afford to lose, and they are assets that are perfectly suited to the West’s conventional military forces and so will give Western militaries a respite from the folly of trying to defeat IS by killing their fighters one or two at a time.