Islamic State: As his plans against IS are more closely examined, it becomes clearer that President Obama has boxed the U.S. into his politicized ideology. Winning should be the only thing, but it isn't.

The president said it again on Wednesday, addressing our forces at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla.: "As your commander in chief, I will not commit you and the rest of our armed forces to fighting another ground war in Iraq."

He might as well have said, "I will not commit you to victory." We may finally have a "strategy" from the president, but we don't — and may never — have the president's plan for victory.

Presidents always say sending troops into war is the gravest decision the office imposes. But is there anything more loathsome than ordering young Americans in when the White House is indifferent to the outcome?

Retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, who helped formulate President George W. Bush's successful surge in Iraq, told the Daily Beast he sees no contingency plan in Obama's anti-IS strategy in the event that the Iraqi army and the Kurds fail to defeat the bloodthirsty new Islamofascist state.

"What happens if the ground offensive is stalled and they are not able to retake Fallujah or Tikrit?" Keane asked. How would the U.S. "regain the initiative? We would never go into something like this without such a plan. This would normally be U.S. and coalition brigades retaking the initiatives if the Iraqis failed."

Also quoted is Institute for the Study of War President Kimberly Kagan, whose husband, Fred, largely formulated the surge. She described the Obama strategy as "a path to disrupt or degrade ISIS, not to defeat or destroy it." A realistic plan for destruction would require about 25,000 ground forces, the Kagans insist in their own detailed plan.

Liberals always want to wage war by not admitting war is war, i.e. Vietnamesque incrementalism. How familiar does this sound, from Mark Moyar's history of the Vietnam war, "Triumph Forsaken"?

"Lyndon Johnson had always wanted to avoid putting U.S. troops into the ground war ... believing it would result in a long, painful and politically troublesome struggle against an enemy who might never give up."

Even when LBJ did send our boys in, "he held out hopes of withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam relatively soon, regardless of how the fighting was going," Moyar points out.

President Obama's ego is as Texas-sized as Johnson's was. It should not be underestimated what an admission of being fundamentally wrong it would be for him to send in ground forces.

This, after all, was the issue that let Obama gain leverage over Hillary Clinton with his party's base in the 2008 race for the Democratic presidential nomination. And it was the difference between the supposed dumb cowboy Bush and the genius Obama, ringing in a new political era in which we fight only smart wars.

To the president's base, it would be like George H.W. Bush breaking his "Read My Lips" tax pledge if he waged this war to win.

But that is no reason not to do the right thing.