Inside Obama’s secret pity party
Poor Barack Obama. Americans don’t appreciate his wisdom, and those nasty Republicans are picking on him again. Woe is the leader of the free world.
That was the essence of his private meeting with friendly journalists, where the president gave his water-carriers talking points so he could jet off to Hawaii and still look as if he’s engaged in national security.
The session was off the record, so Obama couldn’t be quoted or put on the spot with tough, public questions. But his trademark self-pity, partisan pique and warped ideas came through in the subsequent stories and columns.
He blamed cable TV for whipping up fears over the Islamic State, and said, weirdly, that he missed the public mood swing because he doesn’t watch much cable news. The session included his standard lecture about not sacrificing “our values,” meaning we should keep pretending that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism.
A more horrifying point is that the president confirmed the widespread perception that he is pulling punches in the fight against the Islamic State. “Obama doesn’t think this is an existential battle that’s worth the cost to the United States of an all-out war,” columnist David Ignatius said in the Washington Post. A similar conclusion appeared in a New York Times article about the meeting.
Both say Obama will not change course even if America suffers what he regards as minor terror attacks, presumably like the one in San Bernardino that killed 14 people and wounded 22. Ignatius described this as Obama’s “cost-benefit analysis” and wrote that the only thing that would lead the president to alter his strategy “would be a big, orchestrated terrorist incident that so frightened the public that it began to prevent the normal functioning of America.”
Think about the implications of that approach. Despite Obama’s efforts to reassure the country that he is serious about fighting the bloodthirsty jihadists, in truth he is not. He is merely committed to maintaining the status quo.
That has been his approach all along, which has been to downplay the group’s power, then react to its growing reach and ruthlessness by doing the minimum necessary to keep public opinion from collapsing. Apparently he regards his 34 percent approval on the issue as good enough.
His policy might be defensible if there were any evidence it was working. But it has been a disaster and has given the terrorist army time to grow in strength and appeal.
The view that Obama is clinging to now is the same one he had when he claimed that the Islamic State was “contained” a day before the horrific attack in Paris. And one week before the San Bernardino attack, he said, “We know of no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland.”
Those failures are not just perception. They are real. Add to this dangerous mix his nuclear coddling of Iran, and suspicion about his commitment to national security is valid.
Yet, true to his I-know-best arrogance, the president concocted a parade of horribles about other options. He said the only alternative is to send tens of thousands of American ground troops into the Syrian civil war.
The results, he told his stenographers, would be the deaths of 100 American soldiers each month, with as many as 500 wounded.
And he accuses Republicans of fear-mongering!
Nobody is suggesting the straw man he demolishes. Republicans like Marco Rubio, for example, want America to lead an army of Sunni Arab soldiers against the Islamic State, similar to the strategy that Gen. David Petraeus used to help defeat al Qaeda in Iraq.
There is much wrong with Obama’s approach, but two points stand out.
First, it is an absolute dereliction of duty for a president to make a “cost-benefit analysis” that regards any attacks on Americans by foreign enemies as minor. Successful attacks terrorize people well beyond the specific location, and help the Islamic State recruit new sickos eager to shed more blood.
Second, given his record, Obama’s assurances that there are no credible threats now are not comforting. Nobody saw Paris and San Bernardino coming, so who knows what we don’t know?
Precisely because it is impossible to be certain about what terror plans are in the pipeline, the Islamic State must be destroyed now. Later may be too late.
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