By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, November 20, 2015
‘You’re all suckers.”
That has to be what Barack Obama is thinking as the
country falls for his head-fake.
Let’s recap.
George W. Bush’s surge reduced the Islamic State’s
precursor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, to a paltry 700 members, according to CIA director
John Brennan. Its membership has grown by something close to 4,000 percent. As
it metastasized, Obama yawned, calling it the “JV team.” When Syrian president
Bashar al-Assad violated Obama’s “red line,” Obama yawned again, and the
refugee crisis was born.
By August 2014, Obama was grudgingly conceding he needed
a new counterterrorism strategy. One tactic he ruled out: building up
pro-American Syrian forces. He told New
York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that was an unworkable “fantasy.”
Then, within weeks, the Islamic State beheaded American
journalist James Foley. On vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Obama denounced the
murder. Within eight minutes of that statement, he was on the golf course. He
later conceded that was a mistake.
“I should have anticipated the optics,” he told NBC’s
Chuck Todd. “Part of this job is also the theater of it. . . . It’s not
something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters.”
Let’s put a pin in that.
On September 10, 2014, Obama gave a televised White House
address in which he finally laid out his Islamic State strategy. Key to his
plan: bringing the “fantasy” of training Syrian rebels to life.
“This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us,
while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully
pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years,” he said with theatrical confidence.
By late January, the Yemeni government — i.e., our
partners on the ground — had collapsed. But the White House continued to insist
that the strategy was a success.
In September, our effort to train rebels in Syria was
exposed as a boondoggle of epic proportions. A $500 million program had
produced “four or five” fighters, according to General Lloyd Austin, the head
of U.S. Central Command.
When 60 Minutes
correspondent Steve Kroft asked about this spectacular failure last month,
Obama replied that he always knew it wouldn’t work.
“Steve, this is why I’ve been skeptical from the get-go
about the notion that we were going to effectively create this proxy army
inside of Syria,” Obama said.
A day before the Paris attacks, the president told ABC’s
George Stephanopoulos that the Islamic State had been “contained” inside its
borders. This was shortly after the Islamic State had murdered hundreds of
Turkish, Russian, Iraqi, and Lebanese civilians — all of whom lived outside
those borders. Then, the next day, the Islamic State slaughtered more than 100
people in Paris.
That brings us to Monday’s press conference in Turkey.
For a moment, it seemed like the press had finally grasped the staggering failure
of Obama’s strategy. One reporter after another asked the dyspeptic and
defensive president why we weren’t making better progress against these
rapists, slavers, and murderers.
They repeated the question because Obama kept saying his
strategy was working. He described the slaughter in Paris as the kind of
“setback” we should expect from a successful strategy. Even liberals were
aghast at Obama’s failure to appreciate the “theater” of his job.
Oh, but he gets it. Put aside the fact that his
“strategy” was always theater to begin with. His phony war on the Islamic State
was always more about seeming to do something while running out the clock until
his successor inherits his mess.
Obama knew the media would take their eye off the ball if
he distracted them with a passion play about GOP bigotry. He ridiculed
Republicans for their cowardice and cruelty in raising concerns about the
potential security threats posed by Syrian refugees. Never mind that such
caution is informed in part by warnings from the heads of Obama’s CIA, FBI, and
DHS. Obama ludicrously mocked the idea that we prioritize Christian refugees —
victims of Islamic State genocide — as an Islamophobic “religious test” that
was “not American,” even though his administration already gives special
preference to Yazidi refugees from Iraq and federal law requires taking
religion into account when screening refugees. For Obama, politics ends at the
water’s edge, unless he’s speaking abroad.
Obama’s dithering sparked the refugee crisis. He’s now
using a smattering of refugees as a cynical prop to prove he’s the hero of his
own morality tale. The reality is that he’s a villain in his own theater of the
absurd. And we’re the suckers in the audience falling for it.
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