US wants to win this war by outsourcing it

If it were possible to summarize the U.S. strategy in one sentence it could be: “To win a war against Islamist radicals without actually fighting on the ground.”

This has nothing to do with a proxy war, not any longer. This is now something a level up; perhaps it would be more correct to call it a “remote-controlled war.”

The Barack Obama administration wants to win this war by providing state-of-the-art technological support in the form of intelligence and air force support - including planes, missiles and drones - to those fighting on the ground against the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), which controls parts of Iraq and Syria and exercises a high amount of terror.

In a way, the Pentagon wants to “outsource” the logistics and land battle against ISIL by carrying out the air support part of it.

Obama had promised not to send U.S. soldiers to distant lands once again, and wants to conduct a remote-controlled war against ISIL without any bloodshed or getting any dirt on its boots. This also suits Iran - which has an undeclared condition not to see any more American troops in the region, especially in Iraq with its Shiite-led government - for covertly supporting U.S. air strikes and other “remote” ways to pound ISIL positions.

But there is one important question that needs to be answered in this scenario: Who is going to fight the war on the ground and be ready to die to irradiate ISIL?

The Iraqi military and the forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the north, on the Turkish and Iranian borders, seem to be two most obvious sources in Iraq. In Syria, the government’s forces under Bashar al-Assad are not likely to help the U.S.-led coalition for this purpose. First, it is...