WASHINGTON CONFUSION – AT 9:21 A.M. ET:  As the Iraq crisis deepens, and we see the chance that Iraq may dissolve as a nation, there are calls for air strikes.  But who do we strike?  Two great reporters, Eli Lake and Kimberly Dozier, tell us that we really don't know.  From the Daily Beast: 

The U.S. military has the capability to conduct air strikes over Iraq within hours. The problem is they don’t know exactly who they are supposed to be targeting.

President Obama is repositioning military assets closer to Iraq, in case he wants to strike at the terrorists who are threatening to tear the country apart. The problem is, the U.S. doesn’t know who it’s supposed to hit.

Current and retired American defense and intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast that the CIA and the Pentagon are not certain who exactly makes up the forces that have taken so much of Iraq. Moreover, these intelligence and defense officials says that they believe that some of the people fighting with Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) are former U.S. allies who could be turned against the hard-core fanatics—if they can be identified.

“We don’t have boots on ground providing intelligence and we don’t have confidence in information that the Iraqi government provides, because they’ve [been] so heavy-handed in the use of force against Sunni villages,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee.

In other words, the American intelligence community is only now scrambling to draw up a potential target list in Iraq, and possibly Syria—even though the threat of ISIS has been visibly growing for years. And while the analysts are trying to figure out who they should zero in on, Obama administration lawyers are wrestling with what legal authorities the president might have to carry out an attack.

While ISIS is taking over cities like Mosul and Tikrit—acquiring the equipment of a modern army in the process—a strike on ISIS wouldn’t be as simple as, say, attacking one of Saddam’s tank columns during the last Iraq war. It requires a different kind of intelligence. The prime objective is to detain or kill individuals who are indispensable to the networks used by terrorists to conduct their attacks. This model means that the drone strike is the last piece of a long process to identify, locate and verify where an individual target resides. And while that work has been enhanced by high-tech gadgets that can intercept cellphone traffic, it still requires the basic tradecraft of human spying.

But the United States lost much of its visibility into the foreign fighter network in Iraq when it withdrew forces from Iraq in 2011 and pulled its intelligence officers—CIA and defense—inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, according to a former senior U.S. official who had been stationed there during the process.

COMMENT:  Poor human intelligence – intelligence about people and their motives, not about equipment – has always been an American weakness. 

Obama's pathetic decision to pull everything out of Iraq comes back to haunt him.  But it isn't Obama who will pay the price down the line.  The United States will pay the price.

June 16, 2014