The air war in Iraq is expanding. -Yahoo/Reuters.

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters might not be the only ones getting air support. Yahoo/Reuters

The governor of Iraq's Anbar province, Ahmed Khalaf al-Dulaimi, claims that the United States will supply airstrikes and other support in their fight against ISIS. -Yahoo/Reuters. The province, Sunni Muslim controlled and a major battlefield in the old Iraq war, has fallen under attack from ISIS. Dulaimi hopes the U.S. support will help Iraqi forces hold onto the Haditha damn, a major strategic resource. The United States have not confirmed this report.

My Comment:
Looks like mission creep already if this turns out to be true. The original airstrikes were supposed to be limited to protect U.S. advisers. Now we are going to help secure the Anbar province. No question the Haditha dam is hugely important. If ISIS captures it they can either cut off the water for south-east Iraq or open the floodgates and drown them instead. Either way that would cause untold human suffering.

Still, I don't like the way that the air war is expanding. I don't have a problem with killing ISIS militants. I'm all for that, and if it were up to me we would be bombing the hell out of them. But these half-measures are so low-impact that it almost doesn't pay to do them. Plus there is the whole issue that congress should be making these decisions, not the president. I know they are claiming that these strikes are authorized by the old war, but I would still like to see Obama come back from his vacation and have congress vote on involvement in Iraq. He would even get the answer he wants, the Iraq airstrikes are much more popular then the aborted strikes in Syria were.