MESOP TODAY’S SYRIA RESSOURCE PERSONS : Obama to Meet With Anti-ISIS Coalition

“Mr Obama needs to face up to two things. First, most of the coalition wants to see the back of Mr Assad: his serial brutalities against his own people have appalled Sunnis everywhere. Second, the fight against IS cannot succeed without competent troops on the ground to guide coalition aircraft to their targets, pursue enemy leaders and take and hold territory,” writes the Economist.

“What is happening now is a classic problem of diplomacy: a mismatch between means and ends. President Obama wants to destroy ISIS and save the Kurds (and the Yazidi religious minority, and the Iraqi government in Baghdad), but he is willing to do no more than drop bombs. What happens when dropping bombs isn’t enough?” writes Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker.

“We will defeat [ISIS] militarily by cutting off the flow of resources they receive —that’s external financing, foreign fighters, logistic materiel, it’s their ability to access the oil markets with oil they control. We will defeat them by challenging and undermining their ideology, because you can’t bomb an ideology out of existence, you have to challenge it and argue it out of existence. And we will defeat it in Iraq by good governance,” said British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond in an interview with Global Post.