Rich Lowry:
President Barack Obama’s stated goal in the fight against the Islamic State, aka ISIL, is to reduce it to a “manageable problem.”
What this means, he hasn’t spelled out in great specificity. Presumably fewer beheadings. A slower pace of Western recruiting. Fewer genocidal threats against embattled minorities. A downgrading of the caliphate to a mini-state, or merely a large swath of territory in Syria and Iraq.
The evil of ISIL has stirred nearly everyone around President Obama to ringing statements of resolve. Vice President Joe Biden says, “We will follow them to the gates of hell.” Secretary of State John Kerry tweets, “ISIL must be destroyed/will be crushed.”
The president himself? He says it will be “degraded to the point where it is no longer the kind of factor that we’ve seen it being over the last several months.”
Put to the rhythms of Winston Churchill’s famous call to arms in Parliament in June 1940, the Obama posture is, “We shall degrade you, we shall lessen you as a factor, we shall make you manageable, we shall hope that the attention of this great continental nation … turns to something else soon.”
What we have been witnessing the past few weeks, in real time, is the intellectual collapse of Obama’s foreign policy, accompanied by its rapid political unraveling. When Al Franken is ripping you for lacking a strategy against ISIL in Syria, you have a problem.
Obama’s view was that Al Qaeda was holed up in the badlands of Pakistan and you could drone it into submission. Then, if you stopped stirring up hornets’ nests in the Middle East, and demonstrated your good intentions, and pulled entirely out of Iraq and stayed out of Syria, you could focus on “nation building at home” and not worry about places like Mosul and Aleppo.
This, in a nutshell, was the theory of the “don’t do stupid stuff” doctrine.
Every particular was wrong.
Definition of Oxymoron: “Obama’s Foreign Policy”
“The world’s always been messy … we’re just noticing now in part because of social media. If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart.”
A recent comment by Barack Obama, hailed by the left as the most intelligent president, evah!!!
So we are to assume that when the world was “messy” in 1938, no one noticed because we didn’t have Facebook, Twitter or other social media outlets or nightly news? Really, Obama?
The amount of stupid things that Obama has been saying would have gotten any previous president run out of town on a rail by journalists. Yet, even here, we have Obama’s sycophants sing his praises and make excuses for the “stupid stuff” Obama not only says, but does.
@retire05: Biden is putting his speeches on the teleprompter.
To say 0-blama’s foreign policies have failed indicates he had one!! I’m not sure he has had a clue about foreign policy EVER!!