While I'm not going to hold the current administration blameless, I don't think if Obama had been more proactive that ISIS would have been quashed. It is more dynamic that a conventional opponent.
As General Stanley McChrystal wrote in his new book, Team of Teams (haven't read it yet), the military is trained to deal with problems that look like this:
However, the problem it currently faces looks more like this:
Adapting to that kind of change takes a lot more training, preparation and mobilization than we can readily appreciate. I hope that the task is underway.
http://www.businessinsider.com/stanley-mcchrystal-isis-is-brilliant-2015-5
That's one possible conclusion. Another would be to stay out of situations we don't understand, particularly when our vital interests are not threatened.
Sunni troops in Iraq will not stand and fight against a sunni ISIS to defend a government run by shias and which is basically a colony of shia Iran. That is the reality.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar didn't fund ISIS because of a sudden interest in good government and human rights. They didn't want the creation of the shia crescent, from Iran across Iraq and Syria. So they created a prozy army, ISIS, but like Frankenstein's monster, it has gotten too big to control and now could turn on them. So they would like us to send in the U.S. Army to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
Meanwhile, we are trying to stop Iran from getting nukes and confronting them, sort of, in Yemen. We are allied with them in Iraq and Syria however, but at least nominally are deadset against their terrorist proxies hezhbollah.
Perhaps Hillary Clinton is the perfect person to deal with this, given her exquisite ability to balance conflicts of interest.
