Obama Wants to Defeat America, Not ISIS
By Daniel Greenfield
Sultannish.Blogspot.com
Last year at a NATO summit, Obama explicitly
disavowed the idea of containing ISIS. "You can't
contain an organization that is running roughshod
through that much territory, causing that much
havoc, displacing that many people, killing that
many innocents, enslaving that many women," he said.
Instead
he argued, "The goal has to be to dismantle them."
Just before the Paris massacre, Obama shifted back
to containment. “From the start, our goal has been
first to contain them, and we have contained them,”
he said.
Pay no attention to what he said last year. There’s
a new message now. Last year Obama was vowing to
destroy ISIS. Now he had settled for containing
them. And he couldn’t even manage that.
ISIS has expanded into Libya and Yemen. It struck
deep into the heart of Europe as one of its refugee
suicide bombers appeared to have targeted the
President of France and the Foreign Minister of
Germany. That’s the opposite of a terrorist
organization that had been successfully contained.
Obama has been playing tactical word games over ISIS
all along. He would “degrade and ultimately destroy”
ISIS. Or perhaps dismantle the Islamic State. Or
maybe just contain it.
Containment is closest to the truth. Obama has no
plan for defeating ISIS. Nor is he planning to get
one any time soon. There will be talk of
multilateral coalitions. Drone strikes will take out
key figures. And then when this impressive war
theater has died down, ISIS will suddenly pull off
another attack.
And everyone will be baffled at how the “defeated”
terrorist group is still on the march.
The White House version of reality says that ISIS
attacked Paris because it’s losing. Obama also
claimed that Putin’s growing strength in Syria is a
sign of weakness. Never mind that Putin has all but
succeeded in getting countries that were determined
to overthrow Assad to agree to let him stay.
Weakness is strength. Strength is weakness.
Obama’s failed wars occupy a space of unreality that
most Americans associate with Baghdad Bob bellowing
that there are no American soldiers in Iraq. (There
are, according to the White House, still no American
ground forces in Iraq. Only American forces in
firefights on the ground in Iraq.)
There’s nothing new about any of this. Obama doesn’t
win wars. He lies about them.
The botched campaign against ISIS is a replay of the
disaster in Afghanistan complete with ridiculous
rules of engagement, blatant administration lies and
no plan for victory. But there can’t be a plan for
victory because when Obama gets past the buzzwords,
he begins talking about addressing root causes.
And you don’t win wars by addressing root causes.
That’s just a euphemism for appeasement.
Addressing root causes means blaming Islamic
terrorism on everything from colonialism to global
warming. It doesn’t mean defeating it, but finding
new ways to blame it on the West.
Obama and his political allies believe that crime
can’t be fought with cops and wars can’t be won with
soldiers. The only answer lies in addressing the
root causes which, after all the prattling about
climate change and colonialism, really come down to
the Marxist explanation of inequality.
When reporters ask Obama how he plans to win the
war, he smirks tiredly at them and launches into
another condescending explanation about how the
situation is far too complicated for anything as
simple as bombs to work. Underneath that explanation
is the belief that wars are unwinnable.
Obama knows that Americans won’t accept “war just
doesn’t work” as an answer to Islamic terrorism. So
he demonstrates to them that wars don’t work by
fighting wars that are meant to fail.
In Afghanistan, he bled American soldiers as hard as
possible with vicious rules of engagement that
favored the Taliban to destroy support for a war
that most of the country had formerly backed. By
blowing the war, Obama was not only sabotaging the
specific implementation of a policy he opposed, but
the general idea behind it. His failed wars are
meant to teach Americans that war doesn’t work.
The unspoken idea that informs his strategy is that
American power is the root cause of the problems in
the region. Destroying ISIS would solve nothing.
Containing American power is the real answer.
Obama does not have a strategy for defeating ISIS.
He has a strategy for defeating America.
Whatever rhetoric he tosses out, his actual strategy
is to respond to public pressure by doing the least
he can possibly do. He will carry out drone strikes,
not because they’re effective, but because they
inflict the fewest casualties on the enemy.
He may try to contain the enemy, not because he
cares about ISIS, but because he wants to prevent
Americans from “overreacting” and demanding harsher
measures against the Islamic State. Instead of
fighting to win wars, he seeks to deescalate them.
If public pressure forces him to go beyond drones,
he will authorize the fewest air strikes possible.
If he is forced to send in ground troops, he will
see to it that they have the least protection and
the greatest vulnerability to ISIS attacks.
Just like in Afghanistan.
Obama would like ISIS to go away. Not because they
engage in the ethnic cleansing, mass murder and mass
rape of non-Muslims, but because they wake the
sleeping giant of the United States.
And so his idea of war is fighting an informational
conflict against Americans. When Muslim terrorists
commit an atrocity so horrifying that public
pressure forces him to respond, he lies to
Americans. Each time his Baghdad Bob act is
shattered by another Islamic terrorist attack, he
piles on even more lies.
Any strategy that Obama offers against ISIS will
consist of more of the same lies and word games. His
apologists will now debate the meaning of
“containment” and whether he succeeded in defining
it so narrowly on his own terms that he can claim to
have accomplished it. But it really doesn’t matter
what his meaning of “containment” or “is” is.
Failure by any other name smells just as terrible.
Obama responded to ISIS by denying it’s a threat.
Once that stopped being a viable strategy, he began
to stall for time. And he’s still stalling for time,
not to beat ISIS, but to wait until ISIS falls out
of the headlines. That has been his approach to all
his scandals from ObamaCare to the IRS to the VA.
Lie like crazy and wait for people to forget about
it and turn their attention to something else.
This is a containment strategy, but not for ISIS.
It’s a containment strategy for America. Obama isn’t
trying to bottle up ISIS except as a means of
bottling up America. He doesn’t see the Caliph of
the Islamic State as the real threat, but the
average American who watches the latest beheading on
the news and wonders why his government doesn’t do
something about it. To the left it isn’t the Caliph
of ISIS who starts the wars we ought to worry about,
but Joe in Tennessee, Bill in California or Pete in
Minnesota.
That is why Obama sounds bored when talking about
beating ISIS, but heats up when the conversation
turns to fighting Republicans. It’s why Hillary
Clinton named Republicans, not ISIS, as her enemy.
The left is not interested in making war on ISIS. It
is too busy making war on America.