Obama to America: My Failed ISIS Strategy Will Continue

 

 

IBDEditorials.com

 

War On Terror: If one were to sum up President Obama's Sunday address on ISIS, it would go something like: "Fear not, America, for I'm not about to change my anti-terrorism strategy that clearly isn't working."

 

To understand just how tone-deaf Obama's speech was, compare it with French President Francois Hollande's. Three days after the attacks in Paris, he stood before Parliament and in blunt, tough language called for his country to act urgently to counter the growing threat from ISIS.

 

He complained about the international community's "incoherent policy" against Syria and said "we need to do more" and "be merciless." He talked about adding thousands of new police, security and customs officials. A few days later, his government shut down three mosques for a "pattern of radicalization."

 

And Obama? Four days after the San Bernardino terrorist attack he stood in front of his Oval Office desk and lectured the public not to overreact. There will be no tough talk, he said, no tightening of refugee screening, no added scrutiny of Muslims in the U.S., because such things are supposedly just what ISIS wants us to do.

 

Obama then proceeded to dismiss growing public concerns about terrorism by saying he had a strategy — a four-part one, no less: Hunt down terrorists, train Iraqi and Syrian forces, work with friends to "disrupt plots, cut off their financing" and — drumroll please — begin to "establish a process ... to pursue cease-fires and a political resolution to the Syrian war."

 

In other words, keep doing the very things that allowed ISIS to grow and metastasize in the first place.

 

Sure, he said he would "accelerate" some things here and there. And then he attacked Congress for not passing gun-control laws.

 

Obama admits that ISIS "can't defeat us on the battlefield," but he refuses to bring that fight to them because it wouldn't produce a "more sustainable victory." Someone needs to remind him that you must actually have a victory before you can sustain it.

 

Even the optics of Obama's speech were tone deaf. For some unknown reason, he decided to haul his presidential podium into the Oval Office and stand it up front of his desk.

 

Maybe he did it so he could pretend to be speaking before an adoring crowd. Or perhaps it was to save time, since he had a Kennedy Center event to rush off to right after his speech.

Whatever the case, he did nothing to assure Americans only 25% satisfied with the job he's done on ISIS so far that he has any idea of how to do better.