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In Wake of ISIS
Attacks, Obama Delivers National Address With No New Strategies
Mike Gonzalez
December 07, 2015
President Barack Obama clearly meant to convey the seriousness of the
situation we currently face as a nation from the terrorist group known
as the Islamic State (ISIS) by delivering his third address to the
nation from the Oval Office Sunday night. The address, however, did not
contain any new strategy, or any new ideas, about how to defeat a group
that has in quick succession downed a Russian liner and killed 130
people in the heart of Paris and 14 in San Bernardino, the largest
terrorist attack in our homeland since Sept. 11, 2001.
The speech was vintage Obama, right up to the petulant impugning of his
domestic opponents’ motives, the setting up of straw men and the
renewed calls for stricter gun control laws.
The president even started the 15-minute speech by reminding us that
the victims from the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., last
Wednesday were “white and black; Latino and Asian”—something obviously
of great import to Obama but of little value in devising a winning
strategy to keep the nation safe.
The president also felt the need to a lecture to his fellow Americans
to “reject discrimination.” The president continued by stating, “Muslim
Americans are our friends and our neighbors.”
These are lofty positions, no doubt, but they’re a response to a
problem that has yet to manifest itself.
Presidential Incompetence
There was even outright incompetence in the speech, when the president
asserted that he’s “ordered the Departments of State and Homeland
Security to review the visa waiver program under which the female
terrorist in San Bernardino originally came to this country.”
But if he has indeed done that, then he has sent a large bureaucracy on
a fool’s errand.
An embarrassed White House admitted within the hour that the suicide
terrorist in question had entered the United States on a K1 Fiancé Visa.
How on Earth the president can make such an embarrassing mistake on
such an important topic—on only his third national address from the
Oval Office, no less—cannot be blamed on an intern.
Our Strategy Is Clearly Not Working
The fact remains that under Obama’s watch, ISIS has come to control an
area about the size of Maryland and which it calls a caliphate. What
the president referred to as “our strategy to destroy ISIL” did not
contain any admissions of mistakes or departures from what is not
working.
The fact remains that under Obama’s watch, ISIS has come to control an
area about the size of Maryland and which it calls a caliphate.
On the contrary, the president signaled that he was going to stay the
course. “The strategy that we are using now … that is how we’ll achieve
a more sustainable victory,” he said.
As Heritage Foundation Middle East scholar Jim Phillips recently said,
it is precisely because “a long string of ISIS victories have given it
an aura of invincibility” that the group has been able to bring in 25
thousand recruits from 80 countries.
In this type of confrontation, when you are not winning, you’re losing,
and we’re not winning.
The Three Points of Obama’s Speech
In fact, the first three points of the four-point plan in the
president’s speech were self-evident continuations of what he’s done so
far, as Obama himself admitted.
“First, our military will continue to hunt down terrorist plotters in
any country where it is necessary,” said the president, explaining that
American airstrikes “are taking out ISIL leaders, heavy weapons, oil
tankers, [and] infrastructure” and that since the Nov. 13 Paris
attacks, the allies have ramped up cooperation.
“Second, we will continue to provide training and equipment to tens of
thousands of Iraqi and Syrian forces fighting ISIL on the ground so
that we take away their safe havens,” said the president, apparently
doubling down on a program that many critics say has failed.
The following point, too, was more of the same. “Third, we’re working
with friends and allies to stop ISIL’s operations—to disrupt plots, cut
off their financing, and prevent them from recruiting more fighters.
Since the attacks in Paris, we’ve surged intelligence-sharing with our
European allies.”
The final point may have indicated a capitulation of sorts to Russian
President Vladimir Putin. “Fourth, with American leadership, the
international community has begun to establish a process—and
timeline—to pursue ceasefires and a political resolution to the Syrian
war. Doing so will allow the Syrian people and every country, including
our allies, but also countries like Russia, to focus on the common goal
of destroying ISIL.”
This is our strategy to destroy ISIL.
Obama then went on to call on Congress to pass as a string of pet
measures, such as “making it harder for people to buy powerful assault
weapons like the ones used in San Bernardino,” ignoring that more
people died in Paris with its strong gun control laws and that this
would do nothing to prevent terrorist weapons like pipe bombs ,such as
the ones the San Bernardino couple had prepared.
Also on the list was asking Congress to “act to make sure no one on a
no-fly list is able to buy a gun,” ignoring that all sorts of people
without any terrorist background, from the singer Cat Stevens to the
journalist Stephen Hayes, are routinely put on that list through
bureaucratic error.
What Obama Said He Won’t Do
Almost equally important was what the president vowed he would not do.
Number one was being “drawn once more into a long and costly ground war
in Iraq or Syria.” There may be many good reasons for that that, but
the one offered by the president was something of a contradiction:
“That’s what groups like ISIL want. They know they can’t defeat us on
the battlefield.”
The second no-go zone was this old chestnut: “Here’s what else we
cannot do. We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be
defined as a war between America and Islam”—which is precisely what no
serious politician has ever proposed.
Then came the stuff about rejecting discrimination, a non-issue that
the president incredibly put on the same standing as the very real
matter of Muslims needing to do something to ideologically address
extremists in their midst.
Perhaps the worst line of the night—and there were many
competitors—came when the president declared that “our success won’t
depend on tough talk, or abandoning our values, or giving in to fear.”
Perhaps nobody would be afraid if the president had offered a strategy
on how to be tough on the defense of the values of liberal democracy.
Instead we got vintage Obama.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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