The JV Team

The CIA has just tripled the estimated number of jihadists who belong to ISIS … the Junior Varsity (JV) team as Obama described it earlier this year … to well over 30,000. This band of bench warmers now have sophisticated American weaponry captured from the Iraqi non-army, huge amounts of cash appropriated from the banks they have overrun in northern Iraq and Syria … augmented daily by millions of dollars from the Iraqi oil they are selling on the black market, and a brutal propaganda machine that rivals what Goebbels had in Nazi Germany.

And their ranks are swelling daily with foreign fighters traveling from about 80 nations around the world through Turkey … eager to fight for the sake of the caliphate … see: CNN Story. Has Obama and his crew conjured up the gumption to defeat this ragtag team? Somehow I doubt that the United States is anywhere close to getting ahead of the curve on this matter. President Obama has been describes as the “reluctant warrior.” I think that Europe and the rest of the Arab world can be categorized as even less eager to enter into this fray. That is the rub.

How do we then proceed? The Iraqi army has shown itself to be ineffectual. We can’t sort the good guys from the bad in the Free Syrian Army. Therefore, the only boots on the ground we really can count on are the Kurds … who for some stupid reason we can’t supply with heavy weapons … and about 1,500 American Special Forces. I don’t think that this will cut it … given the current pace of ISIS growth and "allied" lethargy.  (We won’t even be bombing targets in Syria for a month!) This is why ISIS is rapidly becoming as existential a threat as we have seen since the time of Suleiman and the Ottoman Empire.

I once described President Obama as Mr. Cool … see: Mr. Cool. Unfortunately, I think we now need Mr. Hot at the helm ... and this we can't possibly get for over another two years. It doesn't look good.