Jim Geraghty highlighted this news item in his Morning Jolt e-mail (subscribe!), but it’s worth mentioning again. ISIS not only has chemical weapons, it’s reportedly used them against the Kurds:
U.S. military officials in Iraq have issued preliminary confirmation that Islamic State militants used mustard gas in a mortar attack on Kurdish forces in August, a Defense Department official said.
After an Aug. 11 attack that reportedly sickened dozens of Kurdish troops, the Kurds provided U.S. officials with fragments of shells that later tested positive for the presence of “HD, or what is known as sulfur mustard,” said Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Killea, chief of staff for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve.
I’m not sure which aspect of the report is more disturbing — that ISIS apparently possesses chemical weapons and has no reluctance to use them, or that this discovery will apparently have no impact on U.S. policy:
[Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Killea, chief of staff for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve,] said the potential confirmation of the Islamic State’s use of chemical weapons will not necessarily have any impact on U.S. policy.
“We really don’t need another reason to hunt down ISIL and kill them wherever we can and whenever we can,” he said. “Any indication of the use of a chemical warfare agent, purely from our perspective, reinforces our position that this is an abhorrent group that will kill indiscriminately without any moral or legal code or restraint.”
But we’re not actually hunting down ISIS and killing them “wherever we can and whenever we can.” Instead, we’re waging a small-scale air war featuring cartoonishly ludicrous rules of engagement while delegating the ground fight to unreliable Iraqis and to courageous but undermanned and under-armed Kurds — Kurds who’ve just been gassed for the first time since Saddam Hussein unleashed chemical hell on Halabja in the closing days of the Iran-Iraq war.
We already knew that ISIS had the will to launch a large-scale attack on the U.S., and it’s increasingly clear that it is gaining the means of hitting us very hard. Do we really have to wait until disaster strikes to get serious about defeating our sworn (and barbaric) enemies?