The Middle East: Supreme Dysfunction

"The enemy has made a decision to make Kobani his main effort."
 "Now, my goal is to defeat and ultimately destroy ISIL. And if he continues to present us with major targets, as he has done in the Kobani area, then clearly, we’ll service those targets."
U.S. General Lloyd J. Austin, head, Central Command, Syria

"ISIS is retreating and we are advancing. Airstrikes destroyed most of their heavy weapons, Those who are left in the city center don’t have a way out."
"We caused ISIS losses in equipment and souls. The battle will be ending soon."
Abu Hasan, Syrian antigovernment Commander fighting alongside Kurds, Kobani

From the hills of Suruc, Turkey, Syrian Kurds can see the battle raging in their city, Kobani, besieged by the Islamic State. Credit Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Imagine, an ideological/religio movement specializing in abhorrently vicious atrocities the better to horrify its target audience, but with a strike force of an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 dedicated fighter-slaughterers holding at bay the great United States of America. Well, that's not right, is it? It's the Central Command of the United States holding the Islamic State group at bay, right? To enable the less experienced and poorly armed Kurds to defend the border city that ISIS is determined to capture.

Given that ISIS is its own press office, has mastered public relations techniques to a most useful degree of professionalism, enabling it to graphically show to the world at large, as well as its admiring followers, the extent of ghastly, menacing atrocities it is capable of, the fact that better armed and larger military groups than it represents melts before its inexorable advance, is partially explained.

Some members of the Iraqi military, at the ISIS advance on Mosul, evidently shed their uniforms and buried them, to enable them to surrender in civilian clothing, in the hope that this would safeguard them from death. That little ploy did no such thing, but it did serve to show the world that the Iraqi military, comprised in large part by Iraqi Shiites while the Iraqi government gave former Sunni members of the military short shrift, haven't what it takes to defend themselves.

Meticulously and professionally trained by American military trainers, munificently armed by American largess, Iraq's military still was incapable of standing firm and meeting the oncoming enemy. An enemy that had managed to successfully build around itself an impenetrable cocoon of brutal might that no ordinary military could defend against. This group of jihadists, Iraqis and a motley collection of happily-brutal psychopaths from across the Muslim world has completely emasculated the Arab male warrior set.

In Syria, the Sunni Syrian majority rebelled and for their troubles the regime served them notice that it was prepared to act in a manner quite as ferociously brutal as the ISIS militias later showed themselves capable of. Perhaps they took inspiration from Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, reasoning that if it worked for him to call in his terrorist Lebanese Hezbollah assets and the terrorist Iranian al-Quds it could work for them as well.

This, in a geography where tribal and sectarian and ethnic-cultural conflict is endemic, never-ending, always prepared to erupt, as Lebanon before the Arab Spring with its fallout from push-back against corrupt, brutal totalitarian rule demonstrated. Since ISIS has such limited numbers to rely upon to keep the Caliphate growing, and it must advance as well as defend itself from international intervention it cannot be the mighty threat it is made out to be.

The U.S.-led coalition set on airstrikes to bomb the ISIS sites of command, control and supply will wreak the kind of havoc that the supreme jihadist group will surely not be capable of surmounting. By celebrating their imminent takeover of Kobani, as easily as Mosul was taken and all the towns and cities between Syria and Iraqi that have fallen to it, with Baghdad close on the agenda, ISIS simply inspires more fear, fear that becomes more resonant than the reality of their thin ranks.

With the aid of those air strikes reluctantly directed toward Kobani by the U.S., the Syrian Kurds have indeed appeared to stop the Islamic State jihadis in their tracks; a week earlier they were reputed to have taken 50% of the city, now it's claimed they have left one-third of what they formerly had taken. The ISIS jihadis had lost their supply lines and were no longer able to move freely in and out of the city. The military powers of the Middle East could well have accomplished what the U.S. has, to date, but did not.

And the reason is the same as the reason for their incessant conflicts; an abiding hatred for one another; tribally, sectarian antipathy, ethnically, ideologically pathologies of historical dimensions and oppositional distaste of a graveyard variety. Rivalries and irritations, aspirations and simmering rage from Saudi Arabia to Iran, and all others in between; Yemen, Qatar, Syria, Sudan, Turkey and Egypt. All jockeying for power and recognition. And all supporting terror.

Welcome to the Middle East.