“I think it’s now crystal clear to us that our strategy, our policy vis-à-vis [the Islamic State] is not working, and it’s time to look at something else,” former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell remarked Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.
Morell is not some gun-slinging partisan, and his statement was hardly controversial. In fact, it seems to be one of the few things everyone not on the Obama White House payroll agrees to be true.
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Unfortunately, President Obama is not part of this consensus. On Thursday, after more than a year of U.S. involvement without significant progress in rolling back the terror group in Iraq and Syria, Obama nonetheless declared that the Islamic State had been “contained.” A day later, as if on cue, the terrorist group’s footsoldiers proceeded to slaughter more than 130 Parisian civilians and wound an additional 350. In his press conference the following Monday, Obama seemed determined to show the nation and the world that he is incapable of changing his plans to account for past failures.
“We have the right strategy, and we’re going to see it through,” he said. There was no acknowledgement that the U.S. fight against the Islamic State in Syria has been essentially fruitless so far, or that U.S. intelligence seems to have very little understanding of the group’s capabilities. Obama continued to project the same groundless optimism that has tained even his administration’s official intelligence analysis about the Islamic State.
Obama could not have prevented the Paris attack, but it demonstrated that for a second time, he had badly underestimated the Islamic State’s ability to project force. He had done the same thing two years earlier, when he tried to assuage concerns over the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq by referring to the Islamic State as a “J.V.” terrorist team. By failing now to adopt a plan that might work, he risks repeating history.
Obama’s original plan for a limited air campaign in Syria supporting U.S.-trained fighters was always well-intentioned, and it even sounded good in theory. But it has proven a bust. Overly restrictive rules of engagement have resulted in just one in four bombing missions dropping any actual bombs. And despite a mind-bogglingly large financial investment by the Department of Defense, those friendly rebel fighters don’t even exist. As Morell noted, Obama’s Syria plan is also being hindered by his refusal to accept that in the end, he will probably have to work with the regime of Bashar al-Assad if he is serious about anihilating the Islamic State.
Visibly irked by the persistence of incredulous journalists, Obama threw into his Monday performance a gratuitous attack on his domestic critics. He accused them of empty sloganeering about “American leadership or American winning or whatever.”
In reality, most of those critics would gladly settle for a bit of American competence and American planning.
