GWOT is Dead! Long Live GWOT!

The big story this morning is one by Mark Landler and Helene Cooper, "Obama Approves Air Surveillance of ISIS in Syria":

Defense officials said Monday evening that the Pentagon was sending in manned and unmanned reconnaissance flights over Syria, using a combination of aircraft, including drones and possibly U2 spy planes. Mr. Obama approved the flights over the weekend, a senior administration official said. 

The flights are a significant step toward direct American military action in Syria, an intervention that could alter the battlefield in the nation’s three-year civil war.

Most of this article and one by Ben Hubbard, "Syria Declares Its Readiness in Backing Efforts to Fight Jihadists," rehash the threadbare and discredited lines from what was once referred to as Syria's civil war: the brutal Assad government will not be aided and the Free Syrian Army will be armed and trained to take the fight to Islamic State in its northern stronghold of Raqqa province. According to Landler and Cooper:

Administration officials said the United States did not intend to notify the Assad government of the planned flights. Mr. Obama, who has repeatedly called for the ouster of Mr. Assad, is loath to be seen as aiding the Syrian government, even inadvertently.

As a result the Pentagon is drafting military options that would strike the militant Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, near the largely erased border between those two nations, as opposed to more deeply inside Syria. The administration is also moving to bolster American support for the moderate Syrian rebels who view Mr. Assad as their main foe. 

On Monday, Syria warned the White House that it needed to coordinate airstrikes against ISIS or it would view them as a breach of its sovereignty and an “act of aggression.” But it signaled its readiness to work with the United States in a coordinated campaign against the militants.

Ben Hubbard manages to repeat as gospel the canard (debunked by Seymour Hersh in two articles, "Whose Sarin?" and "The Red Line and the Rat Line") that the Syrian government gasses its own people:

Antigovernment activists have long accused the Syrian government of allowing ISIS to expand because its presence helped them in the civil war: ISIS was good at killing rebels and strengthened the government’s argument that it was facing a terrorist plot, not a popular uprising. 

But as ISIS has overshadowed the rebel movement, it has increasingly fought the government directly, often winning. 

Since mid-July, the group has seized three military bases in the northern province of Raqqa, including an air base it stormed on Sunday. 

But analysts said it was unlikely that the United States would change direction and publicly ally with Damascus against ISIS. Mr. Assad’s forces have not proved to be effective militarily against the group, and American officials are likely to find it hard to work with a government that has launched chemical attacks on its own people and destroyed residential areas in its quest to kill rebels.

The difficulty for the Obama administration, if chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey is to be believed and USG does indeed intend to knock out IS by hitting it in Raqqa, is how to do this without 1) alienating its chief regional allies -- Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan, and 2) ground troops to advance on jihadi turf in the wake of American air strikes. The Syrian Arab Army is the answer to number two, but it seems clear that the Obama administration will not partner with Damascus for fear of angering the sheikhs. Possibly a mercenary force is being assembled at this very moment.

In the near future there will be American air strikes in northern Syria. Iraq must have a government formed by September 11. Haider al-Abadi, the successor-to-be of Nouri al-Maliki, has signaled his willingness to arm Sunni militias, but only within the existing security structure. A key demand of the Sunnis to participate in any unity government has been to be given control of the defense ministry. I doubt Abadi's offer goes far enough to guarantee their support. Ben Hubbard notes in "Suicide Bomber Kills 13 in Baghdad as New Leader Calls for Unity":

To help combat ISIS, Mr. Abadi, the prime minister-designate, said he planned to increase support for groups of armed citizens who defend their areas, but he said they could operate only under the umbrella of the official security forces.

The status quo is about to get even more messy: No new government in Baghdad, unilateral U.S. air strikes in northern Syria, and now the imminent collapse of national government in Afghanistan. According to Rod Nordland and Jawad Sukhanyar in "Afghan Presidential Candidate Threatens to Withdraw From Election":

KABUL, Afghanistan — One of the two candidates for Afghan president will withdraw from a bitterly contested audit of the results unless election officials meet a series of technical demands made by his campaign, one of his top aides said Tuesday. 

Declaring the process a “joke,” Fazul Ahmad Manawi, the chief auditor for the candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, said Mr. Abdullah would stop cooperating with it and would withdraw from the election entirely unless the demands were met by Wednesday morning. 

As if to underscore the disarray into which the presidential election has descended, Mr. Manawi’s news conference, at the headquarters of the Independent Election Commission, was immediately followed by a melee, with representatives of Mr. Abdullah and his opponent, Ashraf Ghani, shouting and throwing punches until the riot police arrived and restored order, arresting at least two people.

Afghanistan, birthplace of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), is where GWOT dies. Yet GWOT lives on -- in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Nigeria, Egypt, Xinjiang. Long live GWOT!