TIME’s Mark Thompson Quotes NSN Report on the Islamic State

U.S. Military Plan For Looming ISIS Offensive Takes Shape

Mark Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winner who has covered national security and the military since 1979, and for Time since 1994
February 26, 2015

Clearing is relatively easy, but clearing and holding Islamic State territory is the goal

Every U.S. military official says degrading and defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria isn’t a job that can be done by the Pentagon alone. But it also cannot be done without the Pentagon. That’s the bind President Obama finds himself in as he seeks a way to cripple ISIS without putting U.S. combat boots on the ground inside Iraq and Syria (beyond the 3,100 now there to train Iraqi forces and protect the U.S. embassy and other facilities)…

But some maintain that Republican calls for a bigger U.S. role—including getting rid of Assad—would likely lead only to a replay of the unsatisfying U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Greater U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war is increasingly portrayed in political circles as the main alternative to the Obama Administration’s current approach,” the liberal-leaning National Security Network think tank said in a Feb. 18 report. “But…strategies for the United States to fully enter the Syrian civil war would most likely draw the United States into an unwinnable quagmire and unsustainable nation-building project.”

To continue reading the article, click here. 

To read NSN’s report Confronting the Islamic State, click here. 

 

Photo Credit: A U.S. Marine leads a group of Iraqi soldiers through a fire and maneuver course at Al Asad Air Base, Iraq [U.S. Marine Corps Photo by Cpl. Carson A. Gramley/ Released, 1/28/15]