Last year at a NATO summit, Obama explicitly disavowed the idea of containing ISIS. “You can’t contain an organization that is running roughshod through that much territory, causing that much havoc, displacing that many people, killing that many innocents, enslaving that many women,” he said.
Instead he argued, “The goal has to
be to dismantle them.” Just before the Paris massacre,
Obama shifted back to containment. “From the start, our goal has been first to
contain them, and we have contained them,” he said.
Pay no attention to what he said
last year. There’s a new message now. Last year Obama was vowing to destroy
ISIS. Now he had settled for containing them. And he couldn’t even manage that.
ISIS has expanded into Libya and
Yemen. It struck deep into the heart of Europe as one of its refugee suicide
bombers appeared to have targeted the President of France and the Foreign
Minister of Germany. That’s the opposite of a terrorist organization that had
been successfully contained.
Obama has been playing tactical word
games over ISIS all along. He would “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS. Or
perhaps dismantle the Islamic State. Or maybe just contain it.
Containment is closest to the truth.
Obama has no plan for defeating ISIS. Nor is he planning to get one any time
soon. There will be talk of multilateral coalitions. Drone strikes will take
out key figures. And then when this impressive war theater has died down, ISIS
will suddenly pull off another attack. And everyone will be baffled at how the
“defeated” terrorist group is still on the march.
The White House version of reality
says that ISIS attacked Paris because it’s losing. Obama also claimed that
Putin’s growing strength in Syria is a sign of weakness. Never mind that Putin
has all but succeeded in getting countries that were determined to overthrow
Assad to agree to let him stay.
Weakness is strength. Strength is
weakness.
Obama’s failed wars occupy a space
of unreality that most Americans associate with Baghdad Bob bellowing that
there are no American soldiers in Iraq. (There are, according to the White
House, still no American ground forces in Iraq. Only American forces in
firefights on the ground in Iraq.) There’s nothing new about any of
this. Obama doesn’t win wars. He lies about them.
The botched campaign against ISIS is
a replay of the disaster in Afghanistan complete with ridiculous rules of engagement,
blatant administration lies and no plan for victory. But there can’t be a plan
for victory because when Obama gets past the buzzwords, he begins talking about
addressing root causes. And you don’t win wars by addressing root causes.
That’s just a euphemism for appeasement.
Addressing root causes means blaming
Islamic terrorism on everything from colonialism to global warming. It doesn’t
mean defeating it, but finding new ways to blame it on the West.
Obama and his political allies
believe that crime can’t be fought with cops and wars can’t be won with
soldiers. The only answer lies in addressing the root causes which, after all
the prattling about climate change and colonialism, really come down to the
Marxist explanation of inequality.
When reporters ask Obama how he
plans to win the war, he smirks tiredly at them and launches into another
condescending explanation about how the situation is far too complicated for
anything as simple as bombs to work. Underneath that explanation is the belief
that wars are unwinnable.
Obama knows that Americans won’t
accept “war just doesn’t work” as an answer to Islamic terrorism. So he
demonstrates to them that wars don’t work by fighting wars that are meant to
fail.
In Afghanistan, he bled American
soldiers as hard as possible with vicious rules of engagement that favored the
Taliban to destroy support for a war that most of the country had formerly
backed. By blowing the war, Obama was not only sabotaging the specific
implementation of a policy he opposed, but the general idea behind it. His
failed wars are meant to teach Americans that war doesn’t work.
The unspoken idea that informs his
strategy is that American power is the root cause of the problems in the
region. Destroying ISIS would solve nothing. Containing American power is the
real answer. Obama does not have a strategy for defeating ISIS. He has a
strategy for defeating America.
Whatever rhetoric he tosses out, his
actual strategy is to respond to public pressure by doing the least he can
possibly do. He will carry out drone strikes, not because they’re effective,
but because they inflict the fewest casualties on the enemy.
He may try to contain the enemy, not
because he cares about ISIS, but because he wants to prevent Americans from
“overreacting” and demanding harsher measures against the Islamic State.
Instead of fighting to win wars, he seeks to deescalate them. If public
pressure forces him to go beyond drones, he will authorize the fewest air
strikes possible. If he is forced to send in ground troops, he will see to it
that they have the least protection and the greatest vulnerability to ISIS
attacks.
Just like in Afghanistan. Obama
would like ISIS to go away. Not because they engage in the ethnic cleansing,
mass murder and mass rape of non-Muslims, but because they wake the sleeping
giant of the United States.
And so his idea of war is fighting
an informational conflict against Americans. When Muslim terrorists commit an
atrocity so horrifying that public pressure forces him to respond, he lies to
Americans. Each time his Baghdad Bob act is shattered by another Islamic
terrorist attack, he piles on even more lies.
Any strategy that Obama offers
against ISIS will consist of more of the same lies and word games. His
apologists will now debate the meaning of “containment” and whether he
succeeded in defining it so narrowly on his own terms that he can claim to have
accomplished it. But it really doesn’t matter what his meaning of “containment”
or “is” is. Failure by any other name smells just as terrible.
Obama responded to ISIS by denying
it’s a threat. Once that stopped being a viable strategy, he began to stall for
time. And he’s still stalling for time, not to beat ISIS, but to wait until
ISIS falls out of the headlines. That has been his approach to all his scandals
from ObamaCare to the IRS to the VA. Lie
like crazy and wait for people to forget about it and turn their attention to
something else.
This is a containment strategy, but
not for ISIS. It’s a containment strategy for America. Obama isn’t trying to
bottle up ISIS except as a means of bottling up America. He doesn’t see the
Caliph of the Islamic State as the real threat, but the average American who
watches the latest beheading on the news and wonders why his government doesn’t
do something about it. To the left it isn’t the Caliph of ISIS who starts the
wars we ought to worry about, but Joe in Tennessee, Bill in California or Pete
in Minnesota.
That is why Obama sounds bored when
talking about beating ISIS, but heats up when the conversation turns to
fighting Republicans. It’s why Hillary Clinton named Republicans, not ISIS, as
her enemy. The left is not interested in making war on ISIS. It is too busy
making war on America.
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