Rand Paul is on the anti-war warpath. "What would airstrikes accomplish?" the Kentucky Senator asked in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, even as he refused to rule them out in the American response to the ongoing Isis push toward Baghdad. "It's now a jihadist wonderland in Iraq," he said on Sunday, "precisely because we got over-involved." Which led Dick Cheney, on another Sunday show, to say this: "Rand Paul, with all due respect, is basically an isolationist."

But Dick Cheney is actually right on this one: isolationism is not a responsible foreign policy.

​In uniform, I was responsible for outsmarting the adversary. Right now, America's adversaries are watching us flounder in Iraq closely – and they're laughing at us​. ​Anyone who​ has​ fought for Iraq – or studied the sectarian fallout of that fighting – knows air strikes ​will only be the beginning, but the consequences of inaction could be worse. I​f the US wants to keep influence in the region, it needs to ​​​launch truly covert action with Kurdish and Syrian ​groups.

In public, President Obama appears to be preparing for lethal assistance ​to Iraqi security forces ​by sending up to 300 military "advisers". ​This is, in my experience supporting special operations forces, a good first step. ​But ​Obama could be going for a full-on fingertip feel of the environment, one that requires US intelligence agencies to get out of the American embassy and out into the population centers. ​ Without atmospherics, all of the drones and missiles in the world are just expensive paperweights. You can't conduct war blindfolded. ​

Already the Obama administration has waged war while claiming we're not "at war" – in Pakistan, South America and across the Horn of Africa. Many of those efforts have relied, regrettably, on armed drones – but drones alone will be less than useless in the Levant, a sprawling and sectarian region where you need to empower the right people ​with the right skills. And cash. Lots of cash.

​Before you can destroy Isis, you need to destroy the Iranian networks in Syria and Iraq. ​Militants have now taken the town of Al-​Qaim, a checkpoint on the border with Syria​, giving ​​Isis the ability to move large quantities of weapons and men into Iraq​. This will get worse before it gets better.​ And to remove Nouri al-Maliki, it will be necessary to counter and confront Iran's puppet masters inside his power structure. As a senior Iraqi official told the Guardian last week:

Who do you think is running the war? Those three senior generals who ran away? Qassem Suleimani is in charge. And reporting directly to him are the militias, led by Asa'ib ahl al-Haq.

A​ir strikes in favor of the "Iraqi government" are strikes in favor of Maliki's Iranian retainers, which the scholar Phillip Smyth calls "overlooked, growing, well-organized and highly militarily capable". To counter Iran's increasing shadow power, the United States should court the Peshmerga, a fiercely proud, seasoned fighting force dedicated to the independent state of Kurdistan. ​



You can see it all over Iraq when you represent America there: the Kurds know how to fight, and the west doesn't appreciate it – because the Kurds don't build, they tear things down. But America's real friends aren't in Baghdad – they're in the Kurdish stronghold city of Erbil. If the Kurds ask for American recognition of an independent state, they should have it.

And, yes, it's finally time to arm the Syrian rebels properly. They are the only force with any success against Isis. The Syrian crisis was never containable in the first place, but since Isis already has anti-aircraft weapons, the downside of supplying lethal assistance to vetted Syrian rebel groups is relatively ​insignificant​​​. Standing on the sidelines of Jordan and Turkey is no longer enough​, and hopefully, in secret, we're already standing somewhere else.

​It's a new day in Iraq. Will we seize it?