As Obama Tweaks, IS Seizes More Territory

 

IBDEditorials.com

Islamic State terrorist Mohammed Emwazi, also known as Jihadi John, issues threats and demands ransom for hostages in a video from Jan. 28, 2015. Newscom

War On Terror: Just days after the White House termed its IS strategy a "success" that merely needed a bit of "tweaking," the Islamic State continues to gobble territory like some demented version of Pac-Man.

Mere days after seizing Ramadi in Iraq's strategic Anbar Province, the Islamic State this week swept into Syria's city of Palmyra, known for its rich trove of archeological sites and artifacts, but also a key town in the terrorist group's plans to seize control of all of Syria.

What's our plan? "The president is tweaking just about every day," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. Sorry, but so far, IS' strategy is beating President Obama's tweaking. USA Today reports that IS now controls half of Syria's territory. In Iraq, having seized Anbar, IS forces sit just outside of Baghdad.

Our own Pentagon suffers no delusions. On Tuesday, the Defense Department issued a stunning admission of, in its own words, "failure" in allowing Ramadi to fall.

"It was a failure of a lot of things," Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren said, "leadership being one of them, tactics being one of them."

Say, maybe "tweaking" our strategy isn't enough.

This, by the way, is why some Gulf leaders refused to attend President Obama's much-touted Camp David meeting on the Mideast. They smell the stench of failure and don't want its taint on them.

A big part of the problem is that our commander in chief ended our armed engagement in Iraq in 2011 without finishing the job. He failed to intervene in Syria after it crossed the "red line" of chemical weapon use.

Last year, after the stunning rise of the Islamic State from seemingly nothing, the Pentagon embarked on a crash program to train and prepare Iraq's troops for the challenge. It was another tweak that didn't work.

"We train them and turn them back over to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense for follow-on deployments, so we don't necessarily track with great fidelity precisely where each of these trained forces go," Warren noted.

Translation: We have no idea where the hell they are.

Meanwhile, IS has put together a murderous, motivated and growing international fighting force of 17,000 Muslim extremists, many recruited from the West.

They're acquiring land, killing enemies and building a potent future Iraq-Syria terror state that will straddle the Mideast and make Iran look soft by comparison. By doing nothing other than drone and air strikes, the U.S. signals that it believes IS control is a fait accompli.

So what do we do? Neither Democrats nor Republicans are keen for the one thing that would work — boots on the ground. So, given the general zeitgeist, we may have to wait for the Islamic State to take both Syria and Iraq — which would make it the world's 20th largest nation — and begin committing atrocities on a mass scale.

In the meantime, never fear. President Obama will just keep on tweaking.