Should US policy toward ISIL be Containment?

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http://www.juancole.com/2014/09/should-toward-containment.html

Should US policy toward ISIL be Containment?
By Juan Cole | Sep. 17, 2014

The US launched air strikes on Tuesday on ISIL targets, south of Baghdad and also in the north. The ones south of Baghdad were in support of the Iraqi Army, for the first time since the ISIL crisis broke in early June.

US close air support to the Iraqi army and the Kurdistan Peshmerga shouldn’t be necessary. The Iraqi military should be able to deploy helicopter gunships for its own defense. For reasons that are unclear, it apparently cannot, leaving Baghdad open to attack by ISIL. But the most effective campaigns in which the US air force has been involved have been more or less defensive. It helped the Kurds take back territory west of Erbil and around the Mosul Dam. It helped break the ISIL siege of the Shiite Turkmen town of Amerli, averting a massacre of thousands.

The problem is in going beyond stiffening Iraqi government and Kurdish resistance to the ISIL onslaught. For that, in Iraq, the US either needs to enable the invasion of Sunni Arab cities by largely Shiite and non-Arab (Kurdish) forces, or needs to stand up Sunni Arab national guards in the three major Sunni Arab provinces, and support them against ISIL. This latter task is complicated by the feelings of betrayal still suffered by Sunni Arab fighters who fought al-Qaeda in 2007 but were not rewarded with a government job, and whose lives were in danger after the US campaign wound down (al-Qaeda minds when you target them).

President Obama’s speech last Wednesday was a strange mixture of counter-terrorism and warmaking. Counter-Terrorism involves things like strategic precision strikes to foil terrorist groups. A war, in contrast, is a set of campaigns aimed at conquering and holding territory.