Ten months after he made the stunning announcement that "we don't have a strategy yet" to deal with ISIS, President Obama this week announced that we STILL don't have a strategy for ISIS. He carefully laid blame on the Pentagon and on the Iraqi government (whatever that is) for the vacuum, but it is clear that after the fall of Mosul, Ramadi and Palmyra, this administration is completely and frighteningly at sea when it comes to assessing and dealing with foreign threats. Moreover, we are now sending more men and women into harm's way without a strategy. Worse, Obama appears not to have any ability to identify the threat or develop a coherent strategy or lead an effort to appropriately confront it. Our enemies now know this and are acting accordingly.
We are seeing patterns emerge. Obama consistently refuses to either acknowledge the threat or to correctly identify the enemy or its aims.
Every high school football coach in America knows that you NEVER underestimate your opponent. In sports and war, upsets happen. Look at our own Revolutionary War. Obama consistently downplays our adversaries. In the '08 election, he sneered that "Iran is just a tiny country and doesn't represent a threat to us the way the Soviet Union did (he has evidently never heard of the EMP (electromagnetic pulse from a single nuclear detonation). In the 2012 election, he mocked Mitt Romney when Romney raised Russia as a threat, "The 1980's are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because ...the Cold War's been over for 20 years." Less than two years later, Putin took Crimea and now asserts that he considered using nuclear weapons over it. And, of course he famously stated that, "If a JV team puts on a Lakers uniform, that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant."
The JV team has been rolling up victories through Iraq, Syria and now has a point of entry into Western Europe through Libya (created by Obama's "leading from behind" initiative). Reports are now that ISIS has stolen enough nuclear materials to make a dirty bomb. The JV has evidently made it varsity.
Obama has also misidentified the threat. He has continued, in a cartoonish way, to assert that ISIS is not Islamic. ISIS begs to differ. Graeme Wood wrote a masterful article in The Atlantic, "What ISIS Really Wants." (http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/). The punchline is that ISIS IS Islamic. Failure to comprehend that and ignoring that has had devastating consequences. Obama's failure to talk about and condemn their atrocities against Christians....BECAUSE THEY ARE CHRISTIANS is both appalling and puzzling because his handpicked UN ambassador Samantha Power's signature work centers around the prevention of genocide, and in her book, The Problem from Hell, the savagery of ISIS falls squarely within the definition and demands forceful action. Have we even heard a peep from Power? No. She has been completely MIA during the rise of ISIS. Ironically, Obamas rationale for deposing Gaddafi was to prevent genocide. All he accomplished was to pave the way for ISIS the perpetrate its own and open a conduit to Europe. We left the Libyan people completely stranded. The "you break it, you own it" principle has evidently gone the way of the dial phone. The reality is that Obama's policies are now responsible for more deaths in Libya than the lunatic regime of Muammar Gaddafi.
In the same week that Obama admitted that he had no strategy for ISIS, he unveiled a strategy to diversify wealthy neighborhoods through HUD. He simply cannot stand the fact that some people live in nicer places than others. Beheadings of Christians don't really get his blood boiling. But a gated community? Intolerable. THAT he has thought about a lot and has a clear strategy for.
The frightening reality is that Obama has no strategy for ISIS. But ISIS has a strategy for the West.
No comments:
Post a Comment