Its not incompetence. The US could level the whole area.
Its Obama and Bush both making promises about surgical strikes, redlining, and freeing the masses when basically they created chaos. If there were multiple suicide 9-11 type bombings in NY, LA, Chicago, Houston taking out entire high rises and innocents with them you would see the attention to collateral damage go way down. We could wipe out ISIS in one week quite easily. But the collateral damage would be huge. The Russians may not give a if they go in and have people die.