Sunday, 29 August 2021

Picking Isis off one or two at a time

Revenge in some US president's minds means full-scale invasion wtih hundreds of thousands of troops and tanks and artillery fire and B-52 bombers. Thus George W Bush cited as one of the reasons for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 the fact that Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate his Dad, George HW, during a state visit to Kuwait in April 1993. By the time the invasion was launched in March 2003, the bigger reason was Saddam's alleged ownership of weapons of mass destruction. But the "he tried to kill my Dad" came up several times. Then George took revenge on al-Qaeda by invading Afghanistan where the plotting and training for 9/11 took place. Obama did his own bit of revenge for the same reason by killing off Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. Now it's Biden's turn. For the death of 11 US military servicemen and two servicewomen at Kabul airport along with 170 poor Afghan souls, Biden mounted two, so far, Reaper drone strikes, one early Saturday morning, killing two Isis "planners and facilitators" and today launching a similar strike on a vehicle packed with explosives and Isis militants. It's precision stuff, especially when you hear that the weapon used was an RX9 Hellfire missile that consists of six mightily sharpened blades that twirl like a whirling Dervish slicing through everything from a vehicle's bodywork to the bodies of those inside without a sound. There is no explosive involved. For a president who wanted to end forever wars he has found that it's not quite possible. There are too many evil people around intent on killing Americans. I suspect that if George W or Donald Trump were still president they would have launched a mighty strike against the whole lot of them where they hide out in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. But I guess picking on those planning the next bomb outrage is probably more effective at least in the short term. Once the US military have left Afghanistan by midnight on Tuesday, Biden should be able to rest easy. If Isis attacks the Taliban, he won't need to launch any Reaper drone strike with their Ninja weapons.

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