Obviously, President Obama has had a tough weekend, what with a terrorist attack on a major ally and then a long flight to Turkey for the G20, so I suppose we can give him a pass on his foot-stomping tantrum this morning at the world summit in response to questions about how the US will respond to a freshly motivated Islamic State.
But why would we do that?
Although the attacks in Paris came just hours after the President claimed ISIS was “decapitated” and “contained,” and although even liberal allies in the New York Times and elsewhere are calling for a greater focus on defeating, not just controlling the advance of ISIS on the Arab penninsula, Barack Obama spent most of his first G20 press conference insisting that there would be no change to US policy.
“We play into the ISIL narrative when we act as if they are a state and we use routine tactics used to fight a state that is not a state,” Obama said using the alternative name for the terrorist group. “That’s not what is going on here. These are killers with fantasies of glory.”
Last month, White House announced that the U.S. will send a small number of U.S. special operations forces into Syria as part of a strategy shift in Syria. Obama and his administration have come under mounting pressure amid signs the anti-ISIS coalition has stalled or at least failed to turn the tide against the militants — including the recent Pentagon decision to abandon a failed program to train and equip Syrian rebels.
The problem, of course, is that ISIS isn’t a stateless force – at least not in the same way Al Qaeda was. ISIS has designs on bringing about the Caliphate and from there, the apocalypse, and for that, they need to control significant territory across the Middle East. One of ISIS’s biggest beefs with Al Qaeda is that it focused too much on harming the West, but without an ultimate end game. ISIS has that end game. And something tells me that another “Syrian rebel” force, like the ones we were trying to arm and train earlier (to no avail), is going to do much to stop them.
The President, though, is insisting that his theory of controlling and containing ISIS is working, which is weird when you consider that it seems to have, demonstrably, failed miserably in a spectacular way – and in a way that cost more than a hundred lives in what most thought was a safe area. Suicide bombers crossing into Western countries has long been among the biggest fears associated with fighting terrorism, since the very idea eats at the heart of Western values of freedom. The War on Terror has, obviously, been a strange and amorphous strategy, but it had, at its core, a commitment to stopping terrorists where they were before they made it over here. Barack Obama is now saying, quite worryingly, that his strategy may not allow that to be possible.
Terrorists gonna terror. Or something.
He ended his presser with a very comforting, “well, let’s see you come up with a better plan” line. So at least we know he’s approaching this with all the seriousness and sincerity it deserves. Oh, and by the way, he also can’t understand why Americans, including several governors, are concerned with welcoming an influx of Syrian refugees. This, frankly, is just silly. Even if you believe that most of the refugees from Syria are, essentially, harmless, ISIS is clearly using the mass migration of people away from lands as a Trojan Horse, which means they’re driving people from their homes, terrorizing them, victimizing them, killing them, and then using them to escape into the West, victimizing them a second time. It’s not that we don’t sympathize with scared, homeless people, or that we don’t want to help them – it’s just that national security should be our primaryconcern. Obama would prefer to write off any critic of accepting refugees as a racist, a bigot, uncompassionate, but there are good reasons, especially now, to suspect that refugees need to be very carefully screened.
At any rate, maybe what Obama really needs is a nap and a snack. We’ll regroup with him after playtime and see if things go any better.
