Ooops, looks like another Obaminion has strayed off the messaging reservation:
Success against the growing threat of the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) will mean curbing the insurgents so they no longer pose danger, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said Sunday, and unlike President Barack Obama, he referred to the fight as "war," not a counter-terrorism exercise.
"Success looks like an ISIL that no longer threatens our friends, can't accumulate followers and threaten Muslims in Syria, Iraq, or otherwise," McDonough told NBC "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd. "And that's exactly what success looks like."
Well, let's see: In order for ISIS to no longer have the capability to threaten our - well, the U.S. doesn't have "friends," anymore, thanks to Barack Obama, so I suppose "countries that aren't actively hostile" will have to suffice - "non-enemies," their fighters have to be liquidated, their equipment must be destroyed, and their vast financial resources have to be confiscated. Since a great big source of their financial resources is the Iraqi oil fields they conquered this summer, liberating them would require U.S. ground forces to retake that territory. So yeah, THAT would be a "war".
Next: In order to keep ISIS from accumulating followers, the U.S. must reestablish itself as the "strong horse" of the Middle East, which took years and thousands of American casualties and a trillion dollars to accomplish after the national humiliation of 9/11, and will be vastly more difficult to pull off this time after Barack Obama has spent the past six years doing everything in his demidivine power to make the U.S. look like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's bitch. The first prerequisite for such a herculean task would be the full-scale re-invasion of Iraq and the liberation of Syria as well - which, by taking out Bashir Assad's regime at the same time, could be a strategic two-fer by depriving Russia and Iran of a prized catspaw in a very geostrategic area. Decimating the Islamic State would make them look weak, reestablish respect for and fear of the U.S., and re-stabilize the Middle East. Or at least as stable as the Middle East ever gets.
But neither of these things is going to happen:
To achieve that, the United States will wage a counter-terrorism fight like those in Yemen and Somalia, "where we will take the fight to our enemies without putting our ground troops into the effort," McDonough said, echoing President Barack Obama's prime-time speech last week.
Without "our ground troops put into the effort," the territory that ISIS occupies cannot be retaken, and they cannot be defeated.
And again, McDonough wandered off the messaging reservation by mustering the intellectual candor to tacitly admit it:
He admitted, like many military experts, that ground troops are needed, but pointed out to Todd that Obama's plan calls for training opposition troops in Iraq and Syria to handle the ground battles.
"That's why we want to make sure that this coalition brings Sunnis to the fight," said McDonough, who appeared not only on the NBC program, but also on ABC, FOX, and CNN's Sunday news shows to discuss the ongoing ISIS situation.
Opposition troops in Iraq and Syria are inferior and inadequate to the task. If they were not, ISIS wouldn't have overrun eastern Syria and northern Iraq in the first place, now would they?
There's also the "sticky wicket" of having to get other countries to trust Barack Obama for any reason whatsoever, much less to the degree of a military alliance - and that's just the beginning:
The Middle East has confounded outsiders for years, so it is no surprise that another U.S.-led project with a straightforward goal — destroying a marauding organization of [Muslim]s — is bumping up against age-old rivalries and a nod-and-a-wink-style political culture.
U.S. [commissar] of state John Kerry has received backing for the principle of reversing the territorial gains of the Islamic State group in Iraq. But getting concrete assistance is another matter, and there is a whiff of lip service about the proceedings.
Much of the problem lies in the Muslim region's Sunni-Shiite divide, which outsiders tend to underestimate again and again — only to see it emerging as the dominant factor once more.
The Sunnis hate the Shiites and don't want to do anything that helps them. The Shiite Iranians have already declared, straight from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that they will not work with the U.S. to defeat ISIS. The Wahhabist Saudis and the Egyptian military government don't want to attract ISIS's attention any more and sooner than they absolutely have to. Because ISIS is, after all, the "strong horse". And, of course, all those parties hate our infidel guts far more than they do each other. Sending Lurch Kerry to navigate and conciliate that labyrinthine minefield is like entering Forrest Gump in a 4-D chess tournament. Much as, conversely, simply reinvading Iraq and liberating Syria with U.S. ground forces would be ever so much simpler, and, even better, would actually work.
But, again, we have to remember that Operation Relentless Pursuit isn't about what works, and it isn't about defeating, "degrading," or destroying the Islamic State. It's about creating the appearance of same, and only for as long as it takes to take the story out of the headlines and off the front pages. Just like the entire length, breadth, and two-inch depth of The One's drone "war": Make enough "bangs" to impress the LIVs and NIVs without doing any significant damage to his jihadist friends.
And I do not say that perjoratively:
But the president said he had already been headed toward a military response before the men's deaths. He added that ISIS had made a major strategic error by killing them because the anger it generated resulted in the American public's quickly backing military action.
If he had been "an adviser to ISIS," Mr. Obama added, he would not have killed the hostages but released them and pinned notes on their chests saying, "Stay out of here; this is none of your business." Such a move, he speculated, might have undercut support for military intervention. [emphases added]
Jim Geraghty asks, "Why is our president thinking about what he would tell the Islamic State if he were advising them?" Elementary, my dear J-Ger: He doesn't want to fight ISIS, he doesn't want to be forced anywhere near having to concede that he was 100% wrong about Iraq and the entire Middle East, and that George W. Bush was (aside from the "Islam is a religion of peace" codswallop) 100% right, and be compelled to follow in his foreign policy footsteps, and the Islamic State is forcing precisely all of that on him, and at the worst possible domestic political time.
And don't think al-Baghdadi doesn't know it, and that O will "fight" this "war" in such a flaccid way as to guarantee American defeat and glorify him to such a degree that his claim to the title of Global Caliph will become all but unchallengeable.
The fact that Barack Obama cannot bring himself to call this a "war," and that he also appears to really believe that if he doesn't call it a "war," it won't be one, is almost quaint in its utter irrelevance to the reality of the disastrous situation his perfidy is metastasizing. Or, as the old saying goes, the enemy also gets a vote, and they've been "voting" for all-out war against the infidel "crusaders" for, with periodic interruptions, almost fifteen centuries. And now they can see final victory in sight.
Contra Pope Francis, the Islamic State, along with every other American enemy, would be mad not to seize such a plumb opportunity for world conquest, as it may never come 'round again.
Besides, as I'm sure "our president" would agree, it's only fair.
Right, "Denis"?
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