South Asia Center Nonresident Fellow Rajan Menon writes for the National Interest on why an effective US strategy is missing for combating the threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham:
The expert consensus on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has jelled with remarkable rapidity. The vast majority of commentators on this site and others like it concur that the movement is a major threat—not just to Iraq and Syria and their environs, but to the United States and its Western allies as well—and that something needs to be done. TNI’s Robert Merry, among the wisest and most measured voices on international politics, recently called for destroying ISIS.
Once dismissed by President Obama as small beer, ISIS has turned out to be anything but, something the president conceded in his speech to the nation, delivered (not coincidentally) a day before the 13th anniversary (if one can call it that) of 9/11.