By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 01, 2014
It's funny how President Obama is always talking about
"I" and "me" whenever it makes him look good, but suddenly
it's "they" and "we" when mistakes are made..
For instance, for years Obama boasted about how he ended
the Iraq war and how he withdrew American troops. "You know I say what I
mean and I mean what I say," he boasted on the campaign trail in 2012.
"I said I'd end the war in Iraq. I ended it."
Then, over the summer, as one Iraqi city after another
fell to Islamic State militants, and as critics insisted that Obama's decision
to pull all of our troops out of Iraq was partly to blame, he suddenly changed
his tune, mocking the critics. "What I just find interesting is the degree
to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision [to withdraw
U.S. troops]."
On Sunday night, the always-congenial Steve Kroft of
CBS's "60 Minutes" noted comments by James Clapper, the director of
national intelligence. Clapper said, "We overestimated the ability and the
will of our allies, the Iraqi army, to fight." "That's true. That's
absolutely true," Obama replied. "Jim Clapper has acknowledged that I
think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria."
Eli Lake of the Daily Beast contacted a "former
senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni
jihadists in Syria and Iraq," who was, in Lake's words,
"flabbergasted" by the president's remarks. "Either the
president doesn't read the intelligence he's getting or he's bulls--ing,"
the official said.
It's almost surely the latter. Lake and others have gone
on to detail how the intelligence and defense communities were briefing the
White House and Congress about the threat even when Obama was still dismissing
Islamic State as the "jayvee squad" of terrorism.
But while it would be nice to hear the president say,
"I blew it," such admissions are probably too much to expect from any
politician, never mind Obama. What matters aren't words, but deeds.
And after much reluctance the president has been changing
course. He may not speak forthrightly about the fact that he's putting boots on
the ground, but he's putting boots on the ground. He may struggle to call it a
war, but he's waging war on the Islamic State. He may need to rebrand a core
al-Qaeda cell "the Khorasan Group" in order to sidestep embarrassing
questions about his vows of success against "core al-Qaeda," but he
did bomb the Khorasan Group.
Still, there's one area where he is sticking to his
ideological guns. And that is defense spending. He has conveniently adopted a
three-year strategy that will drop this problem in the lap of the next
president.
Maybe three years makes sense, but does it make sense to
hamstring the next commander in chief?
The Syrian phase of this war began with the launching of
Tomahawk missiles from Navy ships. Those missiles cost $1.4 million apiece, but
they're more precious than that because Obama has slashed the Navy's Tomahawk
budget to 100 a year. We launched nearly 50 on the first day of the attack on
Syria alone. That same night, F-22s were used to attack Islamic State and the
Khorasan Group. But Obama has called the plane an "outdated"
"waste" of American tax dollars. We plan to mothball the A-10
Warthog, which was essential in both Iraq wars. We are cutting Army troop
levels to the lowest since before World War II. The Navy's fleet is smaller
than it has been since before WWI, with half the cruiser fleet being
"placed in storage." And on and on.
In his "60 Minutes" interview, Obama explained
why the lion's share of the burden in this fight falls to us. "That's
always the case," he said. "America leads. We are the indispensable
nation. We have capacity no one else has. Our military is the best in the
history of the world. And when trouble comes up anywhere in the world, they
don't call Beijing. They don't call Moscow. They call us. That's the
deal."
He's right. For now.
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