Everybody Hates ISIS, But Here's Why No One Can Take It Out ( Copy Right @ The Business Insider, Author- Fred Kaplan Slate)

Let’s hope that President Obama does not bomb ISIS inside Syria—unless, maybe, the airstrikes are coordinated with some other country’s troops on the ground. That’s what happened in northern Iraq last week, when U.S. airstrikes paved the way for a mix of Iraqi special forces, Shiite militias, and Kurdish peshmerga fighters to push ISIS away from the Mosul Dam. But that’s not likely to happen in Syria.

It’s not likely to happen for two reasons, both lamentable. First, there are no ground forces inside Syria that can both repel ISIS and serve as palatable American allies. Second, the Obama administration and the neighboring Middle Eastern countries appear to have no strategy of what an intervention in Syria might look like or of what Syrian politics should look like in its aftermath.

That is a particular shame, since the United States and just about every country in the region could form a very potent alliance against ISIS. They all hate and fear the al-Qaida offshoot that calls itself the Islamic State. They all share an interest in seeing the group pummeled. But in many of these countries, domestic politics or conflicting interests on other matters impede such an alliance from forming.

A strange alliance—which could include the United States, Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—is at least conceptually feasible in Iraq, assuming its new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, forms a government that seems inclusive and responsive to Shiite and Sunni leaders. If Abadi manages this feat (and the bloody sectarian violence in recent days dampens its prospects), this hypothetical alliance—which includes Sunni and Shiite nations, among others—would be fighting not just against ISIS but also for a stable and potentially amenable Iraq.

One problem with mounting a similar coalition—or even unilateral American action—against ISIS in Syria is precisely this question: Who benefits? Who, or what, would the war be fought for? Syrian President Bashar al-Assad? He would be the biggest beneficiary, but he’s also a mass murderer (very awkward for Obama, who once said “Assad must go”) and Iran’s leading Shiite ally (unpalatable to the region’s Sunni leaders). As for the “moderate” anti-Assad rebels, they don’t seem to be an organized, or perhaps even organizable, force, and perhaps they never were. (If Obama had listened to his advisers and armed these rebels last year, it’s quite likely that the weapons would have wound up in ISIS arsenals by now, just like the U.S.-supplied armored vehicles that the Iraqi army abandoned at ISIS’s first onslaught.)

This is a cold thing to say, but too many countries have an interest in keeping Syria a cauldron of chaos—as long as the brew doesn’t boil over to other countries. Which is why focusing on ISIS in Iraq is a more promising possibility.

Read more: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2014/08/president_obama_shouldn_t_bomb_isis_in_syria_u_s_airstrikes_will_not_be.html#ixzz3CAauba90