Another hard hitting article from Frontline that illuminates the dysfunction in our approach that our leaders and the talking heads on the media who claim to be strategy experts keep side stepping.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/ar...campaign=ICYMI

The Clashing Agendas In The Fight Against ISIS

To listen to this year’s crop of presidential candidates, defeating ISIS is just a matter of enlisting more of our regional allies’ help. We need to build a coalition of Sunni Arab nations, the candidates all say, to form a ground force to go in and take ISIS out. If only it were so simple.
We hear this tune too many times that rings empty, just like elevator music. Through, by, and with, FID, security force assistance, and drivel continues to spew forth regardless of the facts that contradict the effectiveness of this approach when you don't have willing partners.

The author points out that ISIS is a problem, but they're a symptom of a larger issue which is Shia oppression. An oppression we arguably enabled by removing Saddam and enabling mob rule under the rubric of democracy, and then shifting our effort from putting pressure on Assad to myopically focusing on ISIS as though that will work.

When the U.S. airdropped weapons and ammunition in October 2014 to support Syrian Kurds of the YPG fighting ISIS for control of the Syrian border town of Kobani, Turkish tanks and troops stood by. President Recip Tayip Erdogan was furious that the U.S. had decided to supply and support the YPG.
The Turks denied the U.S. to conduct combat operations from Turkey in response, and now this.

Turkey has since opened Incirlik but has continued to target the YPG forces, despite the fact that the YPG is America’s principal and most reliable ground ally in the fight against ISIS.
Next door in Iraq (not to mention the riots in the Green Zone)

Meanwhile, sectarian tensions continue to fester in Iraq. The central government, without a strong national army, has relied on Iranian-backed Shia militias to confront ISIS. The results have been disastrous. After U.S. airstrikes routed ISIS from Tikrit, Iranian-backed Shia militias mounted dozens of revenge attacks against Sunni residents of Saddam Hussein’s hometown and in neighboring provinces as well.
If this was a novel it would be a best seller, but the so called experts in the region prior to 9/11 would argue that while this is good fiction, the probability of something like this happening is quite low or even impossible.

In some regards it reminds of Richard Clark's novel, "The Scorpion's Gate"

http://www.amazon.com/The-Scorpions-...ct_top?ie=UTF8

And one reviewer's comments,

So this is the prediction of the near future Middle East the sage of the 9/11 commission brings us? Rest Assured, none of it will actually happen.