With great sound and fury, French President François Hollande has promised to "lead a war which will be pitiless."
He then ordered a mighty fleet of warplanes to bomb Daesh militants into dust.
And drop many bombs those warplanes proceeded to do.

Keeping support for the escalation going necessarily meant limiting civilian casualties, but the narrative also meant more strikes were needed. This appears to have been resolved, with the lack of good targets, by just hitting empty fields around Raqqa and hyping that they’re going after the ISIS capital.
25-30 French strikes were reported since Friday in Raqqa, but very limited casualties, and most of the property damage apparently to sites that had already been hit in the past or were simply not in use anymore anyhow.

I'm not sure how bombing empty fields is going to defeat ISIS, but I'm sure it will be done in a pitiless manner.
Meanwhile, Russia is close to "wiping out" ISIS in Syria.

ISIS so weakened by Russian airstrikes and desertion it could be destroyed in HOURS
ISLAMIC STATE (ISIS) is now so fragile that its so-called Caliphate could be wiped out in a matter of HOURS, a top terror expert said today.

Of course that article is from five weeks ago.
Anyone who follows the news feed out of Syria will have noticed a distinct lack of significant changes on the front lines over the last couple of months..
Today it was reported that Putin was on the verge of sending 150,000 troops to Syria to wipe out ISIS. I'm sure the jihadists are terrified.

When you think about it, it's hard to think of a group in history more hated and with more enemies out to destroy it than ISIS (except for maybe the slaves of Haiti two centuries ago).
Just consider the massive array of enemies.

There can never have been a policy that more governments are committed to achieving without actually trying to achieve it than the world’s so-called determination to “defeat Isil”.
Everyone is now at it - fighting Isil, that is: the Syrian and Iraqi governments, obviously, parts of whose territory Isil controls; within those failed states, a smorgasbord of local and foreign Shia militias, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, two major Kurdish fighting forces and in Syria non-Isil anti-Assad rebels, including al-Qaeda.
Then there’s the Western allies - the air forces of the United States, Britain, France, Australia, who are bombing Isil in one country or both, with help from other European armed forces in various ways. Russia, of course, has joined in, proudly suggesting that in some way it is the only nation really serious about "defeating terrorism". Finally, there are other Middle Eastern states with a vested interest in preventing Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s caliphate getting out of control - Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are all active or notional parts of the coalition.

Isil are either miraculous fighters or - and this is the truth - the attempt to defeat them is a myth.

ISIL fighters are pretty good, but they are nowhere near that good.
It shouldn't be remotely possible for ISIS to withstand this coalition for as long as they have.

Basically there are two major problems with this war, and neither of which is being publicly acknowledged.

1) Except for the people actually living there, the military effort so far has been mostly token.
For instance, out of 6,353 air strikes in Syria by November 12, only 146 strikes have been done by anyone other than the United States.

2) Everyone involved has a different, conflicting agenda.

Point number two is the important one. It makes a clean victory almost impossible to achieve, and virtually ensures that if ISIS ever is defeated, that the region will simply transition into yet another war.
Let me give you two good examples.

The retaking of Sinjar

One of the biggest defeats inflicted upon ISIS militants in recent days was the victory at Sinjar, the site of the Yazidi massacre of last year.
The victory was both militarily and symbolically significant. However, it also had political significance as well.

The head of the Iraqi Kurdish government, President Masoud Barzani, held a news conference on Mount Sinjar to hail the retaking of the town and made clear that it would formally be incorporated into Kurdistan — a troubling development for the Iraqi government in Baghdad, which considers Sinjar an Iraqi-administered city.
“Sinjar is part of the Kurdistan Region,” he said. “Aside from the Kurdistan flag, no other flag will rise in Sinjar.”
As he uttered those words, however, a different flag was also prominently displayed in Sinjar — that of the rival P.K.K. separatist movement, along with the banners of its Syrian Kurdish offshoot. After weeks of efforts by the Kurdistan government to sideline the P.K.K. during the Sinjar campaign, the rival fighters bitterly insisted that they had in fact led the fighting — not just on Friday, but for months.

In fact, the Turkish-based PKK took the city of Sinjar four hours before the Iraqi peshmerga got there.

There are two big problems with this story.
#1) Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan views the PKK as Turkey's greatest enemy and has vowed to "annihilate" them. So the PKK taking territory in Iraq is the opposite of his plans, and will likely inspire an even larger military response.
The taking of Tal Abyad by the YPG, a PKK-sister group (both of which are listed as terrorist groups by the State Department), was enough to get Erdogan to promise to use "all necessary measures" to prevent Syrian Kurds from advancing further. The YPG then proceeded to engage in ethnic cleansing of the region.

#2) The expansion of Iraqi Kurdistan is alarming to Baghdad as well.
Bloody clashes between Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga and Shia militias from Baghdad have claimed 18 lives this week. Shia militias are taking Kurdish civilians hostage and blocking major roads.
The expansion of Kurdistan beyond its normal boundries will likely lead to yet another war once ISIS is gone.

“We could see outright civil war,” Farhan Siddiqi, a research fellow on international politics and national security at the Middle East Research Institute (MERI), tells The Daily Beast. Siddiqi says he believes the Kurds and the Shia central government would face domestic and international pressure to avoid such a conflict, but if cooler heads failed a hypothetical conflict could escalate into something even worse than the current ISIS war.

Many Americans want the Kurds to be the force to bring down the Islamic State, but in reality every advance by the Kurds pushes the region closer to the next round of civil war.

Kata'ib Hezbollah

Founded: 2007
Terrorist list: UAE and United States

Like the YPG/PKK, the U.S. coordinated air strikes in support of KH, although not as overtly.
What's more, many U.S.-made military weapons are turning up in the hands of Iranian-backed Shia militias like KH.

The risk of not aiding them was greater than the risk of aiding them, the official said, adding that this didn't mean the administration was unconcerned about the risks involved.

Kata'ib Hezbollah (Battalions of the Party of God) made a name for themselves by launching dozens of IED-roadside bombing attacks against coalition forces between 2007 and 2011, and then broadcast videos of the attacks on the internet.
You would think that we would be keeping this terrorist group at arm's length, but you would be wrong.

Iranian-backed Shiite militia groups are now sharing a military base with US military personnel in Iraq's Anbar province, Josh Rogin and Eli Lake of Bloomberg View report.
The Shiite militia groups are overseen by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who is a former commander of Iraqi Hezbollah and a close ally of Iranian military mastermind Qassem Suleimani....
Iraqi Hezbollah, also known as Kataeb Hezbollah, is listed by the US government as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group and has American blood on its hands.
Muhandis, who has been accused of orchestrating the bombings of both the US and French embassies in Kuwait in the 1980s, was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2009 for his role in carrying out destabilizing actions within Iraq at Iran's insistence...The group to this day boasts of its killing of U.S. soldiers.

American GI's are sharing a military base, and basically working alongside, a terrorist group that has killed dozens of American GI's. I guess some terrorists are good enough to be allies.
At least the Shia militia terrorist allies don't cut off people's heads and burn prisoners alive. Oh wait. Our allies cut off heads and burn prisoners alive too.
In almost every single area that the Shia militias have retaken from ISIS, they have engaged in massive ethnic cleansing and targeted assassinations.

So we are working alongside a terrorist group that cuts people's heads off, and that has killed dozens of American soldiers, but at least we are on the same side now, right?
Well, it depends on where our troops are currently standing. Iraq's Shia militias have flooded into Syria.

A report Monday in US media claims that Iran has ordered thousands of Shiite militia fighters from Iraq, known as the Hashd al-Shabi or Popular Mobilization Units, to Syria for an alleged upcoming attack on the rebel-held city of Aleppo.

Iraq's Shia militias have fought in Syria for years, but are dramatically increasing their numbers in Syria today. Some estimate an extra 2,000 fighters in the past couple months.
One of those groups has been Kata'ib Hezbollah.

The official objective of the Obama Administration is regime change in Syria. That's why we have armed, trained and supported the Syrian rebels, and that's why we put special forces in Syria.
The reason Kata'ib Hezbollah is in Syria is to protect the Syrian regime, and is waging war against the Syrian rebels.

It is theoretically possible that a Kata'ib Hezbollah jihadist who killed American soldiers five years ago, could be sharing a meal with American soldiers after cutting off the heads of Sunni prisoners in Iraq tonight, and be shooting American soldiers again in Syria next week.
Which is so mindbogglingly insane only Woody Allen could understand.

Supposedly we are at war to defeat terrorism. At least that is how it was sold to the American public.

We know it’s a difficult concept to grasp, but if we want to stop terrorism we should – wait for it – stop supporting terrorists.

The U.S. supported al-Qaeda in Libya in order to overthrow Gaddaffi. Now ISIS has a firm grip on central Libya, according to the UN.
Other than ISIS, the dominant rebel group in Syria is al-Qaeda and its allied jihadist groups. We've known since 2012 that the arms we've been sending weapons to Syria that have wound up in the hands of al-Qaeda. The former head of the DIA, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, recently said this.

It was a willful decision [by America] to … support an insurgency that had salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood …

I think that comment speaks for itself.

One way to tell just how poorly this war is designed is from the fact that politicians are creating our war strategy based on how it sells to the public domestically rather than people who are actually familiar with the region.
For instance, going after the oil infrastructure of Syria to deny ISIS the ability to smuggle oil sounds like a win-win, right? But how would the locals feel about it?

"Raising the stakes will worsen the situation," said Hassan, author of "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror".
"People depend on oil for their basic livelihoods. If you deprive them of that, it forces them either to flee and become refugees, or join IS, as they need a source of income," he said.
Expanding air strikes also raises the prospect of killing civilians, multiplying grievances and fuelling support for IS.

OK. So what about the drone strike program? That's killed a lot of bad guys and is very popular with the American public, so it must be the way to go. Or not.

Four former US air force service members, with more than 20 years of experience between them operating military drones, have written an open letter to Barack Obama warning that the program of targeted killings by unmanned aircraft has become a major driving force for Isis and other terrorist groups.
In particular, they argue, the killing of innocent civilians in drone airstrikes has acted as one of the most “devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world”.

Of course reconsidering the drone program requires us to actually think of all those innocent people we've killed as real human beings, and the American public simply isn't there yet.
So what do people who actually know what they are doing suggest? General John Allen (Ret.), Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, said this

“If we don’t get at those issues over the long term, not just be compelled to constantly be fighting the symptoms of the problems, which is al Qaeda and which is Daesh - if we don’t get to the left of those symptoms and try to solve these underlying circumstances, working collaboratively with those who are in the region, who best understand the region, then we’re going to be condemned to fight forever.”

Long-term issues? Like the political, cultural and economic issues of the region? Boring stuff like working to make people's lives better, winning hearts and minds, and ensuring peace and prosperity?
Yeh, that's not going to happen. The American public demands that asses be kicked, so asses will be kicked even if it means this war will drag out for an indeterminate time with no real hope of a permanent solution, and victory over ISIS merely means a transition into a new and different war.
Even in the progressive community there is kabuki. Just look at how liberals are embracing Syrian refugees, while at the same time supporting the war that they are fleeing.