to read the statements by Phyllis Bennis and Michael Eisenscher published on September 11, 2014, click on
http://portside.org/print/2014-09-12/how-combat-isis-without-war President Obama is right: There is no military solution.
Military actions will not set the stage for political solutions; they will prevent those solutions from taking hold.
Escalating military actions against this violent extremist organization is not going to work.
The bottom line is there is no immediate action that will make ISIS disappear, even if U.S. airstrikes manage to get the right target somewhere and take out an APC or a truckload of guys with RPGs or whatever.
You can't destroy an ideology - or even an organization -through bombing (look at the efforts to do so with Al Qaeda . . . lots of members killed in Afghanistan, but the organization took root in a bunch of other countries).
Arming the so-called "moderate" opposition in Syria doesn't mean supporting the good guys. It means sending arms to the Free Syrian Army which, according to the New York Times, "went on to behead six ISIS fighters [2]...and then posted the photographs on Facebook."
A military strike might bring some immediate satisfaction, but we all know revenge is a bad basis for foreign policy, especially when it has such dangerous consequences.
As horrifying as the beheading of the two U.S. journalists was, revenge is never a good basis for foreign policy.
more at www.antiwar.org