Islamic State terrorists bombed Brussels’ airport and metro on Tuesday morning, killing at least 34 people and wounding 200 or more. At least nine Americans were wounded by the bombs, which were crude devices loaded with nails and screws, intended to inflict as much wounding and mutilation as possible to whomever was nearby.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls recognized the obvious pattern, after his own nation had been hit with a similar soft-target attack last November, and before that by attacks on a magazine and a Jewish market. “We have been subjected for the last few months in Europe to acts of war,” he said. “We are at war.”
President Obama, halfway around the world on a mission to reopen U.S. relations with Cuba, had a very different reaction. He offered 51 seconds’ of boilerplate commiseration and solidarity and then spent the afternoon watching a baseball game and joining a crowd wave with Raul Castro.
After more than two years of badly underestimating the potency of Islamic State in both conventional military attacks and terrorist spectaculars, the president has ceased to be No-Drama Obama and has become No-Action Obama.
The Islamic State is adept at filling a vacuum. It filled the vacuum left by a weakened Assad regime in Syria, and by America’s overhasty exit from Iraq. Now it is filling the vacuum where American leadership used to be. It has been allowed to become strong on Obama’s watch.
Presidential elections are usually, to some extent, reactions against what voters have experienced with the Oval Office incumbent. So it should be no surprise that Obama’s feckless disengagement from turmoil in the Muslim World should prompt voters to look admiringly at a candidate who promises spontaneous, if largely irrational, acts of military violence as a curative. Americans, fed up with inaction, want a president who, when he gets out of his seat, does so to do something more impressive than the wave.
The excuse Obama offered for keeping his schedule as if nothing had happened was that “[t]he whole premise of terrorism is to try to disrupt people’s daily lives.” But this isn’t quite right. Yes, terrorism is intended to disrupt ordinary people’s lives, and to the extent that they can continue living their lives without fear it fails. But the leader of the world’s most powerful democratic nation has responsibilities that go beyond keeping up appearances of normality. America and its people have no indication that Obama is fulfilling them.
Obama could have offer some specifics, or even just promise to offer specifics soon, about how he plans to be more effective in neutralizing the terrorist threat. The current strategy’s failure is evident. Obama needed to do more than he did to avoid the impression that he was legacy lolygagging in Havana while the world burned.
Instead, the same president who hit the golf course moments after mourning the Islamic State’s brutal murder of an American hostage continued his pattern of inertia. The reputation of the presidency is suffering.
“The American people deserve a serious, long-term strategy to defeat violent Islam,” Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said shortly after receiving news of Tuesday’s attacks. He is right.
