WarSclerotic

Obama’s plan for local armies to fight IS under a “core coalition” is unreal for lack of military muscle, DEBKAfile, September 6, 2014

Facing pressing demands to do something serious about the brutal Islamic State, US President Barack Obama threw together a mix of US air strikes, strengthening moderate Syrian rebel groups and enlisting friendly regional governments for the fight “to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL” A “core coalition” of nine NATO governments was put together, made up of Britain, France, Australia, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark, whose leaders were assured that they were not expected to put boots on the ground.

The US President unveiled this plan at the NATO summit in Wales which ended Friday, Sept. 5

DEBKAfile’s military and counterterrorism sources conclude that his slick recipe lacked the most essential ingredient: Military muscle. No armed force capable of taking on the marching jihadis is to be found in all the vast territory of some 144,000 sq. km seized by the Islamist terrorists, between Raqqa in northrn Syria and the northwestern approaches to Baghdad.

Even in the unlikely event that President Obama was to pour out hundreds of billions of dollars to build such a force, the “core coalition” will hardly find any local governments ready to shoulder the mission, which would be potentially more daunting even that the Al Qaeda and Taliban challenge facing the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The most the US president can hope for in the months remaining to the end of 2014 – and perhaps even much of 2015 – is a string of minor local successes, fought by small forces like the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga, with limited US air support.

Such low-intensity warfare will never gain enough traction to reverse or repel the IS onslaught. There is no real chance of an effort, so stripped-down of the basic tools of war, loosening the clutch of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant on a broad domain, or deterring thousands of jihadis from flocking to the vibrant new caliphate rising there from across the Muslim world, especially the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

Getting to grips with this task would not take months, but much longer – certainly if it rests on the dim hope of rebuilding the Iraqi national army, which never recovered from its humiliating defeat at Islamist hands in May and June. None of its divisions remain intact, and most of them left their weapons on the battlefield in their haste to flee the enemy.

The only combat-trained forces in Iraq are Sunni militias. But they have lost faith in US steps in their country and many have opted to fight under the black SIS flag.

US spokesman hurried to contradict DEBKAfile’s disclosure of Friday, Sept. 5, that the Obama administration and Tehran were fighting ISIS together and sharing intelligence in Iraq and Syria.

But the facts on the ground are undeniable and are pushing Iraqi Sunni leaders and commanders into the arms of the jihadists, roughly 30,000 fighters whose numbers are being swelled by volunteers .

The Kurdish army may not be able to defend its semi-autonomous republic (KRG) and the oilfields of Kirkuk in the north with an army of no more than 20,000 troops, outdated weapons and no air force.

Obama’s reliance on moderate Syrian rebel groups to stand up and fight the Islamists is even less realistic, when they have recently started losing enough spirit to fight their arch enemy, Bashar Assad.

Around the region, too, Saudi King Abdullah and the Emirates will shun any US-led coalition that rests on military and intelligence cooperation with Iran.

President Obama will soon discover his mistake in offering Turkey’s new president Tayyip Erdogan a role in the “core coalition” as the only representative of the Muslim Middle East,  and scorning  to count Egypt and Saudi Arabia into his formula for “degrading and defeating” Al Qaeda.

Erdogan is by and large persona non grata in the Sunni Middle East, excepting only in Qatar. He has won further distrust of late for his avid courtship of Tehran in the footsteps of Barack Obama.

Ankara’s hands are moreover tied by its failure to obtain the release of 46 Turkish citizens including diplomats held hostage since the Islamists overran Mosul in June.

As Obama addresses ISIS, he might learn from an Israeli leader’s stuttering speech – West of Eden Israel News | Haaretz.

Responses to an enemy don’t all have to be ‘Once More Unto the Breach’ or ‘We shall never surrender’ or ‘To the Gates of Hell’ but they can’t sound like storeroom inventory either.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at the NATO 2014 Summit at the Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, South Wales, on September 5, 2014. Photo by AFP

Iran Fails to Address All Nuclear Concerns, U.N. Says – NYTimes.com.

Prospects for an international agreement over Iran’s disputed nuclear program appeared to suffer a setback Friday when a United Nations monitoring agency said the Iranians had yet to meet two of five confidence-building measures to ensure that their activities are purely peaceful.

A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna said Iran had so far not explained unresolved issues over its research into detonators that could be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, and had likewise not explained studies that could be relevant to calculating the explosive yield of a nuclear weapon.

The issues are important because Iran must satisfy the atomic agency’s requests for transparency as part of a broader negotiation Iran has undertaken with the major powers aimed at assuring them its uranium enrichment and other nuclear work will never be used to make bombs.

A temporary accord, which has already been extended once to give negotiators more time to reach a permanent agreement, is due to expire in November. Under that accord, Iran had agreed to freeze most of its nuclear work, including uranium enrichment, in exchange for modest relief of onerous Western sanctions that have hurt its economy.

Iranian officials had agreed to address the confidence-building measures and other concerns in a meeting with the agency’s director general, Yukiya Amano, at meetings in Tehran last month.

The agency said it had asked for a satisfactory response on all five steps by Tuesday.

Iran has repeatedly asserted its nuclear work is peaceful, and President Hassan Rouhani has said resolving the nuclear dispute is one if his most important objectives. But negotiators are believed to remain far apart on some of the most contentious issues, including Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity.

Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman, declined to comment specifically on the atomic agency’s report.

“We know there are outstanding issues with the I.A.E.A. — that is by no means breaking news to us — with Iran’s possible military dimension,” she said. “So I think we look at this in a comprehensive way. We are having the bilateral discussions right now. Those are ongoing.”

While the Obama administration has long insisted that it remains committed to a “long-term comprehensive solution that provides confidence that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful,” it imposed sanctions on several Iranian organizations late last month.

The announcement came as the Iranian government seemed to be balking at scrutiny of its nuclear program. It had refused to allow new inspections of a military installation in Parchin, southwest of Tehran, where I.A.E.A. inspectors have suspected some experimental detonation work once was carried out.