That has been his approach to fighting the Islamic State. He initially called it the “JV.” Critics demanded action. He allowed them about 1,600 troops. Things did not improve. He sent an additional 1,500, too few and restricted in what help they could provide. The Post now reports: “President Obama’s most senior national security advisers have recommended measures that would move U.S. troops closer to the front lines in Iraq and Syria, officials said, a sign of mounting White House dissatisfaction with progress against the Islamic State and a renewed Pentagon push to expand military involvement in long-running conflicts overseas.” Even now, he obviously wants to do as little as possible:
The changes would represent a significant escalation of the American role in Iraq and Syria. They still require formal approval from Obama, who could make a decision as soon as this week and could decide not to alter the current course, said U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are still ongoing. It’s unclear how many additional troops would be required to implement the changes being considered by the president, but the number for now is likely to be relatively small, these officials said.
And let’s not forget that if the president did not pull out all troops from Iraq in the first place, and moved to oust Bashar al-Assad quickly, the Islamic State would not have put down roots there to begin with. And now that the problem is completely out of hand, half-measures don’t work. (“The biggest problem facing Carter, and Obama, is that the increase in American military commitment would be unlikely to produce any major changes to the political situations in Iraq and Syria that have given rise to the Islamic State.”)
This is the classic non-interventionist error: Ignore the problem. Minimize the problem. Don’t deal with the problem. Then, demand to know, “Do you want war?” This is a failure of both vision and will. As for the vision, the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never came to terms with the potency of the Islamic threat or its ability to spread. For purely political reasons — based on their aversion to projecting U.S. power — they pulled troops out too quickly or put too few in, too late.
The Obama-Clinton foreign policy blunders in Libya, Ukraine, Iraq and Syria could have been avoided or certainly minimized had we recognized each threat and moved swiftly to handle it before the only alternative became full-scale war. That, it seems, must be the case Republicans should make in 2016. If you don’t put out brush fires, they become unrestrained disasters for which the solution is infinitely more disagreeable. That’s why the virtually the entire Middle East is ablaze.
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Thttps://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/10/28/fighting-islamic-terrorism-always-too-little-too-late/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_popns
Photo: Islamic State fighters march in Raqqa, Syria. (Associated Press Photo/Militant Website, File)