Obama: "Reduce ISIS To A Manageable Problem"

by JASmius

There was one other quote from the Tom DeLay interview I posted earlier this morning that I decided would work better as the lede for this one:

"This is about terrorists that want to kill Americans and destroy our way of life, and it's a war on terror. It will be a war for many, many more years.

"There are people that want to kill us, and if we can identify them and locate them, we need to kill them . . . This president is using every excuse in the book to keep from doing something that will protect Americans in the homeland." [emphasis added]

Once you see the next quote, you'll see how much like a glove the first quote fits:

Barack Obama said Wednesday that the United States will not be intimidated by Islamic State militants after the beheading of a second American journalist and will build a coalition to "degrade and destroy" the group.

Why do we need a "coalition" to take on a single jihadist group?  ISIS has attacked the U.S, specifically, by name.  Not Britain(istan), not France(istan).  The United Soviet Socialist States of Obamerika(stan).

Well, yes, they did invade Iraq, and they have glommed most of Syria, but O abandoned the former to his Iranian jihadist friends and doesn't give a rat's patoot about the latter.

So....why do we need a "coalition" to "degrade and destroy" ISIS?  Especially when any "coalition partners" would be even more militarily impotent than O has rendered the U.S. and would provide no more than token reinforcement at best?  Are we really that feeble?

Answer (and you knew this was coming): Yes!  We!  Are!  And even if we're not, that simply highlights the core purpose for the coalition gambit: It would take a great deal of time.  It took President Bush upwards of six months to put together his "coalition of the willing" to invade Iraq eleven years ago, as well as dicking around with the UN for an eighteenth anti-Saddam fig leaf (which wasn't forthcoming) to shut up jackoffs like The One, and that's when the U.S. was actually liked AND respected globally and in the Middle East.  Nobody respects or, more to the point, trusts Barack Obama, not after his shivving of every American ally from Israel, to Poland and the Czech Republic over missile defense batteries, to Iraq on ISIS, to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand on Red China's South China Sea bullying.  They want America to lead, not serve as cannon fodder behind which The One can hide, because America is the only country that CAN lead.

Or could. And if America can't lead anymore thanks to the Obama Doctrine, it's time for our former allies to make whatever accommodation can be made with, in this case, the Iranian mullahgarchy to try and "degrade and destroy" the Islamic State. Either way, that "coalition of the gullible" isn't coming together anytime soon. And that suits President Relentless Pursuit just fine:

Obama still did not give a timeline for deciding on a strategy to go after the extremist group's operations in Syria. "It'll take time to roll them back," the president said at a news conference during a visit to Europe.

Oh, I don't know about that, Barry; seems to me like a few strategically targeted neutron warheads would "roll them back" to their constituent quarks and gluons in very short order, actually.  Best of all, it wouldn't require putting American "boots on the ground" again, either.  But I'm guessing that isn't on your box-checking list.

But then, what exactly does "degrade and destroy" mean?  You can't do both, after all.  If you degrade ISIS, they still exist and have to be "contained," which, it seems to be, would be like trying to pick up water with your bare hands.  It would require - guess what? - stout, ruthless counterterror operations, asymmetrical/counter-insurgency campaigns, the drip, drip, drip of daily, relentless U.S. casualties - in essence, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, plus Gitmos in perpetuity - from here to eternity.  Why?  Because jihadists can't be "contained"; not without a massive commitment of American military resources, and not if you are serious about minimizing ISIS's ability to infiltrate our country and carry out mass-casualty attacks.  If, on the other hand, you wish to destroy them, I refer you to the neutron warhead option above.  But, again, employing twenty-first century technology for nineteenth-century ends is probably not on the policy menu, is it?  That must be why al Qaeda was and is not as "decimated" as you led us to believe when you needed us to believe it.

So you really don't want to either "degrade" or "destroy" the Islamic State.  What then do you claim to want to do to ISIS today?:

Just one week after publicly announcing that the United States did not yet have a strategy to combat the threat of ISIS, President Barack Obama has indicated that the current goal of the U.S. effort in Iraq is to diminish the extremist group to "a manageable problem."

And what the hell does that mean?  Wasn't your whole raison d'etere when you permanently inflicted yourself on the national stage to solve problems - "pragmatically" - not "manage" them?  Why do you want to "manage" ISIS when you clearly wish they would just go away?  I already told you above what "managing" the ISIS "problem" will entail, which you made it your life's mission (after golf, shrimp, Galaga, and "interesting Italians") to wipe off the face of the foreign policy Earth in 2008.  So no, you don't want to "manage the problem" any more than you want to "degrade" it.

I would ask what would constitute ISIS as a "manageable problem," but we already know the answer to that, don't we?  Establishing diplomatic relations with the Islamic State.  An Obama-al Baghdadi summit meeting.  Diplomatic recognition.  Opening an American embassy in Mosul.  And all of it is just one more "historic Obama speech" away.  I bet O can just taste it, right behind the chili half smoke afterburn.

And just imagine the possibilities opened up by an ISIS embassy in Washington D.C.

Now try to sleep tonight.

I dare you.