An airwar in Syria, or a Public Relations Pageant?

Adam Kredo reports at the Washington Free Beacon,

U.S. military pilots who have returned from the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq are confirming that they were blocked from dropping 75 percent of their ordnance on terror targets because they could not get clearance to launch a strike, according to a leading member of Congress.

Strikes against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) targets are often blocked due to an Obama administration policy to prevent civilian deaths and collateral damage, according to Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Ace of Spades writes,

People keep saying "An airwar can't win," but it won in Kosovo (surprising me, frankly -- I used to subscribe to the "airpower can't win" thesis).

Then people look at the Syria bombing and say "well there you go, an air war can't win."

But Obama is not conducting an airwar in Syria.

He is conducting a Public Relations Pageant to, as he once proposed in regards to bombing Syria, just do enough so as not to be mocked.

Who knows whether a airwar could win.

Obama is not interested in finding out.

He is pretending to have an airwar so that he doesn't face public pressure to actually mount an airwar. He can always say, "Look, it's just not working." But he's the one determined that it should not work.

Hey, he got that Nobel Peace Prize for nothing -- but now he's trying to earn it.

As I've said repeatedly, you only hear that a terrorist leader was killed in a drone attack. You never hear "a dozen jihadi soldiers were killed in an airstrike."

This is because Obama refuses to kill jihadi soldiers. He only is willing to kill leaders, because, well, if he didn't, we'd impeach him. But he feels leaders are culpable, as leaders (like himself) make moral choices, whereas everyone else are animal-level followers who are simply the playthings of circumstance.

Terrorists, he's told us so many times, are merely misled and misinformed creatures who just need some good economic opportunities and maybe some #HashtagUplift from the State Department and then they'll stop being terrorists.

So why would he bomb them?

So, he doesn't. He will authorize a strike on a terrorist leader or a bomb-maker.

But not a "mere" terrorist soldier. They -- like you -- lack moral agency.

It's only the Exalted People who actually count in this world, and who are actually capable of making moral decisions. The Exalted People -- the ones on TV, largely -- are a sort of breed apart. They are the only people capable of making free choices. This is of course hysterically condescending and elitist, but worse than that, this attitude that ISIS terrorist soldiers are just like the "bitter clingers" of Pennsylvania, clinging to their xenophobia, guns, and religion, and thus are to be pitied and led into enlightenment, is what permits ISIS' reign of terror.*

Read more here.