All
the commentaries about ISIS and the campaign against it, whether coming
from the left, right, or middle, overlook the basic nature of the
conflict: the fact that this is a thirty -- if not a hundred -- years’
war.
Barack Obama, the president with the least understanding of military affairs of any on record, is fighting this as a limited war, a war of “containment” with no overall strategy of the moment, much less any kind of grand strategy for the long run. Obama, along with his various Middle East “experts” of the Susan Rice and Samantha Power variety, persists in stumbling from crisis to crisis, never accomplishing much, never looking forward to the next move, forever playing catchup ball. The end result has been political chaos, humanitarian disaster, and a revival of Jihadi fortunes throughout the Islamic crescent.
We got in this position through half steps. The Bush administration was unwilling to lay out the facts of this conflict in the manner of John F. Kennedy’s description of the Cold War as the “long twilight struggle.” All the same, Bush had a strategy, and a very profound one: crush the Taliban, harry Al Qaeda, destroy Saddam Hussein’s Iraq -- which would inevitably try to set itself up as Terrorism Central -- and terrify the rest of the Arab world, whether allies or enemies, into behaving themselves.
Barack Obama, the president with the least understanding of military affairs of any on record, is fighting this as a limited war, a war of “containment” with no overall strategy of the moment, much less any kind of grand strategy for the long run. Obama, along with his various Middle East “experts” of the Susan Rice and Samantha Power variety, persists in stumbling from crisis to crisis, never accomplishing much, never looking forward to the next move, forever playing catchup ball. The end result has been political chaos, humanitarian disaster, and a revival of Jihadi fortunes throughout the Islamic crescent.
We got in this position through half steps. The Bush administration was unwilling to lay out the facts of this conflict in the manner of John F. Kennedy’s description of the Cold War as the “long twilight struggle.” All the same, Bush had a strategy, and a very profound one: crush the Taliban, harry Al Qaeda, destroy Saddam Hussein’s Iraq -- which would inevitably try to set itself up as Terrorism Central -- and terrify the rest of the Arab world, whether allies or enemies, into behaving themselves.
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