New Plan to Crush ISIS Surprisingly Similar to Old Plan

Suhaib Salem/Reuters via ZUMA

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Yesterday a reader asked me what was happening with the new plan to annihilate ISIS, which was supposed to be ready to go at the end of February. It’s done, I told him, but it hasn’t been released yet. He wrote back, asking how I knew stuff like this. I told him my secret source: I think I read about it in the New York Times.

All well and good, but what’s in the plan? My secret source this time is NBC News:

Now, the Pentagon has given [Trump] a secret plan, but it turns out to be a little more than an “intensification” of the same slow and steady approach that Trump derided under the Obama administration, two senior officials who have reviewed the document told NBC News.

The plan calls for continued bombing; beefing up support and assistance to local forces to retake its Iraqi stronghold Mosul and ultimately the ISIS capital of Raqqa in Syria; drying up ISIS’s sources of income; and stabilizing the areas retaken from ISIS, the officials say.

Gee, I thought we were supposed to be bombing the shit out of ISIS and taking Iraq’s oil, but apparently that plan got lost somewhere between Election Day and now. Or did it? After all, there’s no chance that President Trump is going to announce this new plan as an “intensification.” He’s going to go on TV and claim that it’s the biggest military operation since D-Day. It makes Rolling Thunder look like kids with popguns. It’s more strategically brilliant than the Inchon landing. And it will be a more famous victory than even the Gipper’s invasion of Granada.

When you hear all this stuff, just remember that it’s Trump’s usual “truthful hyperbole.” In reality, the new operation is just going to be a modest uptick in the tempo of the Obama plan that’s been gradually and steadily making progress for the past two years.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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