Advertising our weakness quite openly now

Remember that big announcement about retaking Mosul and exactly how and when post-America planned to do it?

Never mind:

Old and busted: Open-source war planning. New hotness: Strategic incoherence! A week ago, the Pentagon briefed reporters on the plan to retake Mosul from ISIS in April using mainly Iraqi Army troops, down to the timing of the attack and a rough estimate of the numbers and types of troops needed to accomplish the job. Just seven days later, the Department of Defense pushed off the date until autumn … if then. A DoD source told The Daily Beast’s Nancy Youssef that, er, they’ve belatedly discovered that Iraqi troops aren’t ready now, and probably won’t be ready for months:

The U.S. military’s goal to retake Iraq’s second largest city from the self-proclaimed Islamic State has been pushed back several months at least, defense officials told The Daily Beast. That’s a major shift for the Pentagon, which recently announced that the first major ground offensive in the war against ISIS could come in the next few weeks.

Defense officials once hoped that Iraqi troops could move into Mosul by the Spring and reclaim the city from ISIS. Now, those officials say, Fall is more realistic. And even that date was tenuous.

“It is an Iraqi decision but we don’t want to do anything until they are ready and can win decisively,” a military official explained to the Daily Beast. “They cannot now.”

So … did the Iraqis change their mind, or did the US fail to ask them in the first place? One would think that the Pentagon would have coordinated with their Iraqi counterparts before making the singularly strange decision to announce a major offensive would take place a few weeks ahead of time, along with the number of forces to be deployed. For that matter, the US military should have known the capabilities of the Iraqi army, too. If the Iraqis couldn’t win decisively now, shouldn’t the Pentagon have known that? Did anyone think to consider that before last week’s public bravado?

I'm inclined to concur that the whole thing was bravado.  It was cobbled together to put window dressing on the Most Equal Comrade's utter boredom with the task of preserving Western civilization.  It was designed to make him look focused and committed and strategic.  But the homework was not done to keep the Pentagon from looking like the Keystone Cops.

And so the Christian-eliminating, statue-smashing and general consolidation of ISIS control will continue.  Only the evil side in this struggle is serious.