Obama The Real Victim in ISIL Crisis

[JamesL]

Is Obama Leading or Being Led?

September 9, 2014 Consider this paradox: Americans overwhelmingly support President Obama's actions against the Islamic State so far—airstrikes and humanitarian assistance without ground troops—and yet they disapprove of Obama's handling of the ISIS crisis. Why the split mind?

The White House and its liberal media echo chamber says it has nothing to do with the president's job performance, which they find virtually flawless. Spokesman Dan Pfeiffer played the victim card: "The people who try to beat us up over these things will continue to do so."The Huffington Post blamed the American people; we're too stupid to know what's good for us.

Not everyone follows foreign policy all that closely: Nearly a third of Americans think the U.S. has bombed Syria recently, and nearly a quarter were willing to opine on non existent legislation addressing Ukraine. In the absence of extensive knowledge of U.S. military actions, many end up relying on other cues, like partisanship—in the most recent CNN/ORC poll, Democrats were nearly six times more likely than Republicans to say Obama was doing a good job handling ISIS.

In defense of my fellow Americans, I have a different theory. It goes to the reason that just 37 percent of the public approve of Obama's handling of the ISIS crisis, according to a new-CNN/ORC poll, and only 43 percent consider him a "strong leader" in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll.

• He doesn't seem to be taking the threat seriously enough.

• His assurances are habitually wrong.

• He stubbornly clings to his views.

For a sense of how much harm Obama has done to his image as commander in chief, read Peter Baker's analysis in The New York Times on Tuesday. He makes a powerful, if not unique, argument that Obama's assessment of the world is at odds with hard reality.

When President Obama addresses the nation on Wednesday to explain his plan to defeat Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria, it is a fair bet he will not call them the "JV team."

Nor does he seem likely to describe Iraq as "sovereign, stable, and self-reliant" with a "representative government." And presumably he will not assert after more than a decade of conflict that "the tide of war is receding."
​

Those are Obama's past assurance, all proven wrong well after he abandoned them. There's more.

"We don't have a strategy yet."

"The truth of the matter is that the world has always been messy. In part, we're just noticing now because of social media … "

"We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized."

"I didn't set a red line. The world set a red line."

"Don't do stupid stuff."

​

With each tone-deaf assertion, not to mention the jarring disconnect of playing golf after announcing the beheading of an American journalist, Obama has squandered the public's faith. It's one thing to support the policies. It's another to support the man.

"Obama does himself no favors with his periodic slumbers, his indisciplines of conception and rhetoric. He and his aides take too much comfort in their sense of being misunderstood and stymied,"writes The New Yorker's David Remnick, an Obama supporter.

After a summer of such disconnect,the people are speaking. A majority of Americans think Obama is too cautious, and 60 percent consider ISIS a serious threat to U.S. interests. They're saying:This ain't no JV, get off the golf course, get a strategy and keep us safe.

The good news for Obama is that his hawk-and-dove policies match the public's mood. His record suggests that he has no qualms about taking risks to fight terrorism. The question is whether Obama is leading the American public, or whether the public is leading him.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/white-house/is-obama-leading-or-being-led-20140909

 

[dbphoenix]

While not returning to Washington after the Foley execution was monumentally stupid on Obama's part, do you happen to know if there's anyone in Congress who is a student of warfare in the way Patton was?

 

[AAAintheBeltway]

That article is ridiculous. The Obama/Clinton foreing policy created ISIS and armed it. First, they destabilized an important US ally, Egypt. Egypt is the intellectual center of the Arab world. Bad ideas flow from there like sewage after a flood. Putting the muslim brotherhood in power reignited the hopes of radicals all over the area.

Then they just had to move on and destabilize Libya. Islamists were able to take over vast weapons stores there and use them in other ventures in Africa and more importantly, syria. The Benghazi debacle, surely tied to US arms running into Syria, was merely the tip of the iceberg. Now Libya is a full-fledged failed state. Of course, the media keeps a respectful silence because it might taint the Hillary as greatest Secretary of State ever narrative.

Incredibly, with two disasters under their belt and having imperiled Israel, they moved on the Syria, encouraging more revolution and instability. Assad's crime was the same as Khaddafi's, fighting back when islamists tried to take over his country. His tactics might have seemed harsh, but give the man his due, he's still in power. Our kid glove tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't exactly work so well.

Now inconveniently, the people we were supporting in Syria turn out to be the people cutting off heads in Iraq. And committing a litany of other war crimes and human rights outrages, ranging from mass murder to ethnic cleansing to human slavery to persecuting non-muslims. We bombed Serbia for weeks for killing a few muslim separatists, but large scale mass murder by islamists seems to be judged on the same scale liberals use to excuse black crime here.

So people have solid reasons to think the obama/clinton foreign policy has been a freakin' disaster of epic proportions. As for ISIS, having put ourselves into a terrible position, the options are few and unappealing. Putting boots on the ground is a nonstarter, but leave it to braindead republicans to try to alienate voters by advocating it. Why should we? Let Saudi Arabia, Turkey et al take some responsibility for cleaning up a mess they had a hand in creating. They have more than enough troops to do the job.

We can provide some air support, but Saudi Arabia and Turkey again have modern air forces.

Where we can do something useful is to force the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Qataris, Gulf Arabs et al to stop funding ISIS. If we can put the screws to Putin for whatever he is doing that we are so upset about, why can't we apply the same medicine to these facilitators of terrorism? Of course, some money men in NYC and London will be unhappy. They prefer that we not annoy the rich arabs. Let americans do the dying and keep the commissions flowing. Whatever.

 

[CaptainObvious]

The Huffington Post blamed the American people; we're too stupid to know what's good for us.

I heard that stupid broad from Salon use the same line a couple days ago. Went something like, Obama is playing chess on some multi-dimensional level that we mere mortals cannot comprehend. The only thing that is beyond comprehension is the lengths these leftists will go to in defending the utter incompetence of Obama and his administration. Then they have the nerve to accuse Mrs. Rice of having battered wife syndrome. LOL! These f'n nitwits have been pummeled for six years straight and still go back for more.

 

[fhl]