Matthews: ‘It Doesn’t Look Like’ Our ISIS Strategy Is Working

MSNBC host Chris Matthews declared, “it doesn’t look like our policy, our program of going after ISIS is working” on Friday’s “Hardball.”

Matthews said, “right now, it doesn’t look like our policy, our program of going after ISIS is working with the fall of these cities like Palmyra, and Mosul, and the rest of them.”

Intelwire.com’s J.M. Berger added, “I don’t think we have a clear strategy. I think we’re looking to make the optics of having an impact on this, but we’re not really taking an aggressive stand on it, and it’s a complicated equation. A lot of what we do, if we were to be more aggressive with our airstrikes, providing air cover, would be assisting the Syrian regime, or assisting the Iranian regime. So, everything we do has kind of cascading consequences. I think that, you know, certainly I would agree that we should not be looking to put ground groups into this situation, and possibly that we should not be trying to get deeper into it even from the airstrikes perspective. ” And “I think that this is a regional conflict. I think there’s going to be, unfortunately, that we’re going to have to see a reset of the political systems in the Middle East before we see real change on this. If we’re committed to doing airstrikes, however, I think that there’s more that we can do. I think we can be more aggressive about, for instance, taking out the roads in between key centers in ISIS territory. We could take out their cell towers, we could take out electricity, a lot of stuff we could do without necessarily incurring a lot of civilian casualties.”

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