I can’t recall any time when a president gave a press conference about some foreign military crisis just to say, “We don’t have a strategy yet.”
And yet, that’s precisely what President Obama did in talking about confronting ISIS, the Islamic caliphate army that has taken over much of Iraq and Syria.
Besides make Obama look like even more of a weakling than he usually does, the comment does a couple of things. One, it signals ISIS that they’ve got an “all-clear” from the White House to keep doing what they’re doing, so long as they don’t directly threaten U.S. personnel (journalists, missionaries and assorted civilians are fine, however). Two, it reveals the depth of the personal conflict Obama is working through.
It’s well-known around the world, and widely reported in the foreign press, that ISIS exists at least partly through Obama’s assistance. The core of ISIS is composed of “rebel” fighters from Syria, the same mercenaries Obama spent years importing and arming via a smuggling pipeline that goes through Turkey. With the release earlier this year of five terrorist leaders from Guantanamo in exchange for an American deserter, ISIS has gained both direction and influence.
Obama’s half-hearted targeted airstrikes on ISIS positions have caused minimal damage to the Islamists and barely done anything for the thousands of Christian and Kurdish refugees they were supposedly intended to help, most of whom have perished by now of hunger and thirst.
Just in recent weeks, ISIS has kidnapped and raped hundreds of Christian women and girls, selling who knows how many of them into slavery; besieged thousands of unarmed refugees on an Iraqi mountaintop; posted a video of an Islamist beheading an American journalist; marched hundreds of captured Syrian soldiers naked through town to their place of execution.
In response, Obama has bombed a few ISIS positions; informed ISIS kidnappers via press conference that U.S. special forces are pursuing them; let ISIS know that we don’t have a plan for stopping them; gone golfing; decided to send John Kerry to Iraq; and bought a new suit (which was the talk of the mainstream media).
The media are now working to explain why “Obama’s team” doesn’t have a plan.
News flash: His “team,” which includes experienced military men and women, has a plan; in fact, it’s probably got dozens of plans for just this scenario. If there’s no strategy yet it’s because Obama himself is stalling.
Said one Pentagon official about Obama’s “no strategy” press conference: “It’s not just demoralizing to those who want to stop ISIS in its tracks, but ISIS is just going to act with greater impunity now if they believe they got a free pass. Every single ISIS leader was watching that.”
For one thing, Obama is afraid of making a real military commitment because he would lose the support of his rabid anti-war base. He’s already hemorrhaged public opinion for the past year; he needs to hang on to what’s left as Democrats go into midterm elections, lest he lose the Senate.
More importantly, though, ISIS is his gang. Those are his people, the Muslims he promised in his autobiography to side with when times get tough. Obama secretly helped put the ISIS crew together long before he got up the nerve to admit publicly that he supported the Syrian “rebels.” It was just part of his Arab Spring strategy (not spontaneous, grass-roots democracy).
Obama cleared the way for ISIS by yanking our troops out of Iraq to appease the pinko anti-war crowd. Now that his Muslim peeps are on their feet, all this pressure to stop ISIS is counter to his personal plans for the Mideast.
Obama Administration officials have expressed frustration at Obama’s lack of willingness to decide to fight ISIS. But the reason for his dithering is simple: He wants ISIS to win.
What we’re seeing is a president publicly engaging in treason and getting away with it.
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