Among the states which make-up the U.S.-assembled-and-led, multinational military coalition presently targeting the Islamic State (IS, ISIS) group the United States is the only country which is targeting ISIS forces in both Iraq and Syria. The European members of this coalition are bombing ISIS forces in Iraq under the pretext that the Iraqi government, unlike the authorities in Damascus, welcomes their combating of such forces while the Arabs member states are not bombing ISIS in Iraq but solely in Syria. While ISIS symbolically dismantled the frontier between Iraq and Syria it is clear that the invisible lines in the dirt which separate them as states are still adhered to by different coalition members.
When writing about this campaign I tend to refer to the various incidents by what “theater” of this campaign they fall under, be it the Iraqi or Syrian theater of war. But increasingly I get a sense that the U.S. doesn’t seem interested in distinguishing where they are fighting this war. And I’m not just talking about recent comments made by Senator John McCain, who insisted that his country “can’t treat Iraq and Syria as different battlegrounds because it’s the same enemy”, but what Secretary of State John Kerry adamantly argued about a month ago before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Which was that if the Obama administration is only authorized to target ISIS in those two countries that will in turn signal to the Islamist group that they could potentially be safe from attack outside the present bi-state war-zone, at least for however long it would take for the administration to get Congressional authorization to target them.
These lines of reasoning are very telling as they in a sense concede, or at least recognize, the depressing reality on the ground which Islamic State has achieved through conquest and accordingly see it as expedient to more or less completely disregard the lines that separate the two polities in the fight against this Islamist group. In essence the likes of Kerry and McCain are arguing that the war is against the Islamic State, not against ISIS in two states, or wherever else they spread to, but against this violently imposed Islamist polity itself. Meaning the only frontiers that should dictate the scope-and-scale of this U.S. operation will all depend on how far the front-lines of the Islamic State extend.
