This is war, not an exercise in project management

In a 2010 American Spectator piece, Angelo Codevilla coined the terms "ruling class" and "country class" and made his distinction between them thusly:

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always,  in America as elsewhere,  some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways,  who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins,  the New York financiers,  the land barons of California,  Texas,  and Florida,  the industrialists of Pittsburgh,  the Southern aristocracy,  and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government,  and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man,  about American history,  and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today's ruling class,  from Boston to San Diego,  was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance,  as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil,  complete with secular sacred history,  sins (against minorities and the environment),  and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in,  their road up included government channels and government money because,  as government has grown,  its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some,  e.g.,  Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner,  never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government,  out of it,  or halfway,  America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes,  habits,  and tools

of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally,  dislike each other more,  and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom,  as Lincoln reminded them,  "prayed to the same God." By contrast,  while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity.

This model goes far in explaining how a lot of large modern corporations, owned, as corporations always have been, by investors and in the business of profitably providing quality goods and services, come to acquiesce to all manner of left-wing agendas, as well as some trade-association behaviors and the pro-illegal-alien-amnesty drift of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Codevilla says that neither the rise-of-the-technocrat view nor the mere fact of wealth are fully satisfactory  explanations for the new ruling class:

The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly,  modern society became so complex and productive,  the technical skills to run it so rare,  that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a "newocracy": a "new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization -- including the multinational manager,  the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy." In fact,  our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government,  and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs,  from Montgomery County,  Maryland,  to Palo Alto,  California,  to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers,  or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather,  regardless of where they live,  their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that,  whether in government power directly or as officers in companies,  their careers and fortunes depend on government.

Rather, the reason for its evolution is that it offers a sense of belonging to a club that will justify self-congratulation  - and ever-greater prevalence within society.

Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense,  it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere,  it is a "machine," that is,  based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth. Because this is so,  whatever else such parties might accomplish,  they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges -- civic as well as economic -- to the party's clients,  directly or indirectly. This,  incidentally,  is close to Aristotle's view of democracy. Hence our ruling class's standard approach to any and all matters,  its solution to any and all problems,  is to increase the power of the government -- meaning of those who run it,  meaning themselves,  to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs,  contracts,  etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class's solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes,  global cooling and global warming. A priori,  one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler,  much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.

He goes on to examine how this has played itself out in areas such as health care, the environment, and family life.  Everything becomes more public and bureaucratic.  The state eventually permeates all areas of life.

Then he gets to the matter of foreign policy and national security:

Because our ruling class deems unsophisticated the American people's perennial preference for decisive military action or none,  its default solution to international threats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term,  twilight efforts to reform the world's Vietnams,  Somalias,  Iraqs,  and Afghanistans,  believing that changing hearts and minds is the prerequisite of peace and that it knows how to change them. The apparently endless series of wars in which our ruling class has embroiled America,  wars that have achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives and treasure,  has contributed to defining it,  and to discrediting it -- but not in its own eyes.

Which brings us to the subject of his latest piece, an essay at The Federalist entitled "The Ruling Class Is Fooling Itself About ISIS."  Decisive action is the screamingly obvious solution to this menace, but the overlords sniff that it lacks sufficient nuance for the much-vaunted 21st century:

The American people’s reaction to Muslim thugs of the “Islamic State” ritually knifing off the heads of people who look like you and me boils down to “let’s destroy these bastards”—which is common sense. But our ruling class, from President Obama on the Left to The Wall Street Journal on the Right, take the public’s pressure to do this as another occasion for further indulging their longtime preferences, prejudices, and proclivities for half-measures in foreign affairs—the very things that have invited people from all over the planet to join hunting season on Americans.

This indulgence so overwhelms our ruling class’s perception of reality that the recipes put forth by its several wings, little different from one another, are identical in the one essential respect: none of them involve any plans which, if carried out, would destroy the Islamic State, kill large numbers of the cut-throats, and discourage others from following in their footsteps. Hence, like the George W. Bush’s “war on terror” and for the same reasons, this exercise of our ruling class’s wisdom in foreign affairs will decrease respect for us while invigorating our enemies.

The WSJ’s recommendations, like the Obama administration’s projected activities, are all about discrete measures—some air strikes, some arming of local forces, etc. But they abstract from the fundamental reality of any and all activities: He who wills any end must will the means to achieve it. 

Thus does the ruling class continue to believe that a critical mass of "moderate"  Sunnis can be marshalled for the task of shrinking / degrading / defeating / managing (the outcome depending on the way a given question about an endgame is posed to a given ruling-class figure) the Islamic State.

According to the same fantasy, conducting air strikes today against the IS in former Iraq and Syria would encourage its Sunni-Wahabi fighters to defect to the ranks of U.S.-supported “moderate” Sunnis. This neglects not only that the flow of fighters in the region has always gone only in one direction—away from the less pure and less brutal to the purer and most brutal Islamists. It also neglects the incommensurability of the two sets of fighters’ objectives. The “moderates” are mostly Syrians interested in governing Syria, while the Islamic State’s fighters are led by Saddam’s Iraqi cadre, have fighters from all over the world, and have pan-Islamic objectives. Joe Manchin is right. The WSJ notwithstanding, while the “moderates” will take U.S. money and arms, no amount of “vetting” will or can cause them to fight the IS for us.

While Obama limits himself to unexplained confidence that Sunni Arab states will join in fighting the IS, the Journal supposes to know why they have not done so yet, and why instead they have been helping the jihadis: because our aid to the right Sunnis in 2012 and 2013 was “microscopic and half hearted.” This was the aid being brokered by the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and cut off by mortar shells expertly aimed by we know not whom. But the WSJ knows who’s to blame for the Sunni Arabs’ failure to meet the ruling class’s expectations: “Some Conservatives.”

He explains why the "moderate Sunni" upon whom we would rely for teh ground-combat component of this undertaking is a phantom:

Believing in the saving power of a “moderate Sunni” wave is as politically correct though patently silly as believing in global warming after years of record cold. All know that the Kurds will fight only for Kurdistan. The Iraqi army has proved beyond doubt that, as a fighting force, it exists only insofar as it is composed of Shiite militias. But our inward-looking, bipartisan ruling class refuses to deal with reality. War consists of massive killing that dispirits the survivors. Yet our ruling class refuses to consider how many of what categories of people will have to be killed in order to end this war with the peace we want. War does not tolerate solipsism.

And so this current situation will result in either a slog or a catastrophe.  An actual victory and ensuing peace is not in the cards.