He's staaaaaaaallling:
The U.S. has begun surveillance flights over Syria after President Barack Obama gave the OK, U.S. officials said, a move that could pave the way for airstrikes against Islamic State militant targets there.
While the White House says Obama has not approved military action inside Syria, additional intelligence on the militants would likely be necessary before he could take that step. Pentagon officials have been drafting potential options for the president, including airstrikes.
One official said the administration has a need for reliable intelligence from Syria and called the surveillance flights an important avenue for obtaining data.
Two U.S. officials said Monday that Obama had approved the flights, while another U.S. official said early Tuesday that they had begun. The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter by name, and spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday that the U.S. wants more clarity on the militants in Syria, but declined to comment on the surveillance flights.
Very neat. It keeps the balls spinning, the clock ticking, and creates again the appearance that the Regime is doing something about ISIS without actually doing anything. And the cover for it is perfect: "If we're going to bomb ISIS inside Syria, we have to have intel on targets and personnel and their deployment, don't we?" The obvious answer to which is, "yes, of course". However long that winds up taking to gather. And in the mean time....nothing. And the shining hope that all of this will either blow over or be knocked off the front pages by the next bleepstorm, which appears to be less than a week away, as it happens.
Or, in other words, very recent history is repeating itself:
Very few decisions made in the Obama administration are not politically driven, and the delayed rescue mission of American photojournalist James Foley is no exception.
“Pentagon sources said Foley and the others might well have been rescued but Obama, concerned about the ramifications of US troops being killed or captured in Syria, took too long to authorize the mission,” according to a report in the Sunday Times.
As in a full month - during which time he was.....oh, hell, you know what he was doing:
However, it also seems worth noting that the eventual timing of the mission may have made for a nice July 4th weekend announcement for Obama had the mission succeeded. Instead, Obama played golf on July 5th, as well as an additional six times in the month he is said to have spent agonizing over his decision, the delay of which may have cost journalist Foley his life.
Anthony Shaffer, a former lieutenant-colonel in U.S. military intelligence who worked on covert operations, said: “I’m told it was almost a 30-day delay from when they said they wanted to go to when he finally gave the green light. They were ready to go in June to grab the guy [Foley] and they weren’t permitted.”
So. Was O fretful about the fallout from sending U.S. military personnel into Syria if something went wrong? Was he also concerned that the upside - rolling out a grateful James Foley and his family in the Rose Garden for the inevitable touchdown spike photo op - wouldn't provide enough counterbalance to that potential downside in such close proximity to the humiliation of having already had to implicitly admit that he was wrong about Iraq and George W. Bush was right, as effectively conceded by his having to, inch by grudging inch, go back down the same strategic road Dubya did? Or did he simply not want to rescue Mr. Foley and his fellow captives at all but want to look like he was trying to do so? Or, as I have speculated, could it be that they were all liquidated soon after capture and all of this is Obamunist/jihadist performance art?
One thing I do know with utmost confidence: Barack Obama is never, EVER going to seriously bomb ISIS, in Syria or anywhere else. All he has to do is hold out until next week's Executive amnesty decree and the Islamic State will be long forgotten.
For a while, anyway....
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