Success or Failure?
By Thomas Sowell
TownHall.com
Those people who say that President Obama has no
clear vision and no clear strategy for dealing with
the ISIS terrorists in the Middle East may be
mistaken. It seems to me that he has a very clear
and very consistent strategy. And a vision behind
that strategy.
First the strategy -- which is to get each crisis
off the front pages and off television news programs
as quickly as he can, in whatever way he can, at the
lowest political cost. Calling ISIS a junior varsity
months ago accomplished that goal.
Saying before the 2012 elections that "bin Laden is
dead" and that terrorism was defeated accomplished
the goal of getting reelected.
Ineffective sanctions against Iran and Russia
likewise serve a clear purpose. They serve to give
the illusion that Obama is doing something that will
stop Iran from getting nuclear bombs and stop Russia
from invading Ukraine.
This forestalls the massive and enraged outcries
there would be if the public were fully aware that
he was doing nothing serious enough to prevent
either of these things from happening. Generations
of Americans yet unborn may curse us all for leaving
them hostage to a nuclear terrorist Iran. But
generations yet unborn do not vote, so they carry no
weight with Barack Obama.
No one has a perfect batting average in any field,
so Obama has been caught in some dicey situations,
such as the sudden eruption of ISIS on the world
stage, with their videotaped beheadings that make it
hard to get them off the front pages and off the TV
newscasts.
Caught off guard, the president has played for time
-- time for Iraq to get its internal politics fixed,
time for our allies to come together, time for the
military to create a strategy. Ideally, from his
standpoint, time for the whole ISIS crisis to blow
over.
There is always someone else to blame for whatever
goes wrong in the Obama administration. Supposedly
the intelligence services had not kept him informed
about how imminent the ISIS threat was. But others
who received top-secret briefings by the
intelligence services say otherwise.
Some people are wondering how someone of obvious
intelligence like Barack Obama could be so mistaken
about so many things, especially in deadly foreign
policy issues. But there is no way of knowing
whether anyone is succeeding or failing without
first knowing what they are trying to do.
If you assume that Barack Obama is trying to protect
the safety and interests of the United States and
its allies, then clearly he has been a monumental
failure. It is hard to think of any part of the
world where things have gotten better for us since
the Obama administration began.
Certainly not in Iraq. Or Iran. Or Libya. Or China.
Things went from bad to worse after Obama intervened
in Egypt and helped put the murderous Muslim
Brotherhood in power. Fortunately for Egypt -- and
for the whole Middle East -- the Egyptian military
took the Muslim Brotherhood out of power, in
defiance of Obama.
If you start from the assumption that Barack Obama
wanted to advance America's interests, this is truly
an unbelievable record of failure. But what is there
in Obama's background that would justify the
assumption that America's best interests are his
goal?
He has, from childhood on, been mentored by, or
allied with, people hostile to the United States and
to American values. His mentors and allies have all
been very much like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright,
even if they were not as flamboyant.
Barack Obama has succeeded in reducing America's
military strength while our adversaries are
increasing theirs, and reducing our credibility and
influence with our allies. That is completely
consistent with his vision of how the world ought to
be, with the West taken down a peg and humbled.
We are currently at a point where we can either kill
as many of the ISIS terrorists as possible over
there -- where they are bunched together and visible
against a desert background -- or else leave the job
half done and have them come over here, where they
will be hard to find, and can start beheading
Americans in America.
Everything in Barack Obama's history suggests that
he is going to leave the job half done, so long as
that gets the issue off the front pages and off the
TV newscasts.