Friday, March 17, 2017

Everywhere and nowhere

Reuters --

The Pentagon on Friday denied accusations by a Syrian rebel group that the United States had targeted a mosque in Syria and, in a rare move, showed an aerial image to illustrate the mosque was intact and the building destroyed was in fact across the street.

Since the Assad and Putin forces target mosques, it's quite possible that worshippers who normally attend the mosque were meeting across the street.

The broader point is that one genuine difficulty that Trump inherited from Obama, but has nonetheless aggravated, is a fatal fuzziness about the exact strategy for targeting Al Qaeda. Here's the US Central Command press release giving their version of the above strike --

U.S. forces conducted an airstrike on an Al Qaeda in Syria meeting location March 16 in Idlib, Syria, killing several terrorists.

Yet, there is no such group as "Al Qaeda in Syria." At one point, that might have been Jabhat al-Nusra, but that group delinked itself from Al Qaeda and renamed itself Fatah al-Sham -- but the press release doesn't use that name anyway. As we've noted before, the contortions involved in targeting al Qaeda in Syria including inventing a name for a group that no one else uses -- the Khorasan Group.

That same obsession with doing something about Al Qaeda lies behind the stepped up attacks in Yemen, including the one in which two Americans died. A war with a slippery mandate is not going to go well, even if the victims will be far away. 

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