Kobanî

The world watches, breathless, the human drama playing out in the  town of Kobani, as the jihadis of the Islamic State continue to tighten, anaconda-like, around the Kurdish redoubt. But the response from this administration to losing what may be the only reliable set of allies in the morass that is Iraq and Syria, is more Alfred P. Newman than Winston S. Churchill.  As CNN reports:

U.S. airstrikes “are not going to save” the key Syrian city of Kobani from being overtaken by ISIS, said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby. “I think we all should be steeling ourselves for that eventuality,” he told reporters in a daily briefing Wednesday. “We are doing everything we can to halt” ISIS’ progress against the town, but airstrikes alone cannot stop the Islamist militants, Kirby added. “We’ve been very honest about the limits of air power here. The ground forces that matter the most are indigenous ground forces, and we don’t have a willing, capable, effective partner on the ground inside Syria right now — it’s just a fact,” he said. The greater U.S. strategy, Kirby said, is to degrade ISIS’ ability to sustain itself.

Several senior U.S. administration officials said Kobani will soon fall to ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic State. They downplayed the importance of it, saying the city is not a major U.S. concern.

In other words, we can’t do more than we are currently doing because we lack an effective partner on the ground, which is our excuse for allowing ISIS to exterminate the only reasonable partner on the ground.

As CSP Fellow Robert Zubrin noted last week, this is a strategy of nearly unimaginable cynicism:

If we are to win the war against the Islamic State, we need ground forces, and the Obama administration has rejected the idea of sending in any of our own. The Kurds, who have demonstrated both their bravery and their willingness to be friends with America, are right there, and already engaged in the fight. If supplied with adequate arms and backed by serious U.S. tactical air support, they could roll up ISIS as rapidly as the similarly reinforced Northern Alliance did the Taliban in the fall of 2001. Done right, this war could be won in months, instead of waged inconclusively for years.

The administration, however, has rejected this alternative, and has instead opted for a Saudi-Qatari plan to allow the Syrian Kurds to be exterminated while training a new Sunni Arab army in Saudi Arabia. Given the Saudi role in the new army’s tutelage and officer selection, the Islamist nature of this force is a foregone conclusion.

Meanwhile our “allies” in Turkey have massed troops on their side of the border, not to relieve the siege, but to prevent a flood of Kurdish refugees seeking to escape the inevitable massacre that will follow ISIS victory. Turkish crackdowns on Kurdish protestors urging more action to save their brethren resulted in violence killing  almost two dozen. In the German city of Hamburg, Kurds and Salafi Muslims, some armed with iron bars, clubs and knives clashed, with fifteen injured. Kurdish protestors rallied in Belgium and Holland as well.

What is occurring in Kobani, will not remain in Kobani. The forces at work have global ambitions, and the message sent by our failure will resonate with would be allies and Pro-American forces across the globe.  Referring to the protests, Bloomberg’s editors noted yesterday that, “Turkey will pay for abandoning the Kurds.”

No, we will all pay.