Is the US locked into a ‘forever war’?

In the summer of 2014, President Obama was trying to stick to his plan to stay out of war in the Middle East. He was the guy who brings soldiers home. That’s what he’d promised.

But after the Islamic State group attack on the Yazidis in Iraq, and the ensuing images of people being hauled off the top of Mount Sinjar, air strikes began inside Iraq on August 8th.

Eleven days later, it was the image of the journalist James Foley kneeling before Jihadi John that broke America’s heart. To compound the suffering, two weeks later, another video, this time of another journalist, Steven Sotloff. Abdul-Rahman Kassig followed in November.

By then, the President had pledged that America would come after their killers and destroy and degrade the Islamic State group.

Today, in the Pentagon briefing room, speaking via scratchy video link from Baghdad, Colonel Steve Warren linked the drone strike in Raqqah targetting Jihadi John, to other operations; in Ramadi, on Mount Sinjar, Fallujah, Mosul, Mara and Dayr Az Zawr. Evidence, he said, of a comprehensive thought-out campaign attacking ISIS across Iraq and Syria. Asked about the significance of the killing of Jihadi John, Colonel Warren called him a human animal, someone without whom the world would be a better place.

But for the family who lost its son to the gruesome violence of Jihadi John, there were words of compassion. Diane Foley, the mother of James, said it saddened her that “here in America we’re celebrating the killing of this deranged young man”, that it gives her no solace, and had circumstances been different Jim, her son, probably would have befriended him and tried to help him.

It’s questionable whether there will ever be water tight confirmation of Jihadi John’s demise. One Pentagon source said he’d been evaporated. But the repercussions of the terror he wrought linger still, not only for the families of his victims. The US is now locked, some say, into a forever war, certain to outlive the Presidency of the leader who launched it so reluctantly.