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After the Paris attacks the president got really angry – at Americans, says Michael Barone.
Three days after the Islamic State terrorist attacks in Paris, Americans were primed to hear their president express heartfelt anger, which he did in his press conference in Antalya, Turkey, at the end of the G-20 summit. And they did hear him describe ISIS as “this barbaric terrorist organization” and acknowledge that the “terrible events in Paris were a terrible and sickening setback.”
But what really got him angry, as the transcript and video make clear, were reporters’ repeated questions about the minimal success of his strategy against ISIS; Republicans’ proposals for more active engagement in Syria and Iraq; and critics of his decision to allow 10,000 Syrians into the United States. …
Robert Tracinski, at the Federalist, calls him the worst president ever.
… It’s clear that the prospect of imposing gun control domestically gets Obama riled up. Fighting the enemies of America overseas does not. But the first of these goals is actually prohibited to him by the Constitution — while the second is mandated for him. I don’t know if we’ve ever seen a president whose personal priorities are so out of sync with the actual demands of his office.
The administration’s reaction has only gotten worse as it has had more days to respond. On Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry let out the howler that the terrorist attack in France earlier this year — wiping out the headquarters of a satirical magazine that had offended radical Muslims — was kind of understandable.
There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people.
To be sure, this sentiment didn’t come from Obama himself. But he hired Kerry, who has a record of making horribly insensitive statements. He is the same guy who thought a James Taylor song was an appropriate response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre — and Obama apparently agreed that this would make up for skipping out on an international unity rally in support of France. So maybe we know now why the administration couldn’t really get mobilized to show support for Charlie Hebdo: deep down, they thought the magazine had it coming.
Obama’s administration can’t even get the easy, symbolic stuff right. But the real problem is the substance of his response.
That brings us to Obama’s petty, peevish press conference on Monday. …
… This is one of those moments when you almost appreciate the parliamentary system, which can hold a vote of no confidence in the chief executive. You want to talk about popping off? If Obama is traumatized and overwhelmed by the job of being commander-in-chief, he can pop off to the golf course and clear the way for someone else to do it.
More from Peter Wehner.
We all know people of towering arrogance and we all know people of staggering incompetence, but Barack Obama is quite possibly the perfect package. No one on the scene today combines these two qualities in quite the same way as Mr. Obama.
On the incompetence side, and sticking just with the president’s policies and record in the greater Middle East, there is Mr. Obama’s mishandling of the rise of the Islamic State, which just last year he referred to as the “jayvee team” and just last week declared was “contained.” Recall his threat to Syrian President Assad that if Assad used chemical weapons on his own people it would constitute crossing a “red line” (Assad did and Obama did nothing), and his stop-start-stop support for opposition forces in Syria.
Then there is the president’s decision to pull out all American troops from Iraq, which had disastrous consequences; his failures in Afghanistan (including announcing a withdrawal date even as he was announcing a surge in troops); his bungled relations with Egypt; his failure to support the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 and his nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, which Charles Krauthammer called ”the worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history.” Add to that Mr. Obama declaring his policies in Libya, Yemen and Somalia to be models of success before things collapses in all three countries, his alienation and mistreatment of Israel, and his botched handling of relations with our Arab allies – not to mention policies that have allowed Russia a presence in the Middle East unlike any its had since Anwar Sadat expelled the Soviet Union from Egypt in the early 1970s – and you have a catastrophic foreign policy record. It was only in the summer of last year that the Wall Street Journal reported, “The breadth of global instability now unfolding hasn’t been seen since the late 1970s” – and things are more disordered, chaotic and violent now then it was then. Things are so bad that the president has even lost CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. …
And Jonathan Tobin.
… the main takeaway from Obama’s presser is not so much that he is unwilling to consider alternatives to an American strategy that offers little hope of defeating ISIS. Just as important is his dogged refusal to admit that he has failed in spite of the manifest evidence that American policy is an ongoing disaster. That’s a terrible failing in any man, let alone a commander-in-chief. But it is particularly bad for Obama because, at least when viewed from this perspective, because it proves that the keynote of his entire presidency is a falsehood. Throughout the last seven years, Democrats have justified everything that Obama has done, good or bad, on the basis of the contrast with the supposedly failed administration of George W. Bush.
Most of us may agree that the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake and there is much else to criticize about the Bush presidency. But when faced with the disaster that the insurgency created after Saddam’s fall, Bush did not pretend that all was well as Obama did today. Though he was no more eager to admit failure than anyone else, Bush did not double down on a strategy that was going nowhere. At the end of 2006 with the war at a stalemate, he faced up to facts. He sacked his secretary of defense and switched strategies allowing the troop surge that would during the course of the next two years turn the war to America’s favor. By the time that Obama came into office, he had inherited a stable situation that he could declare Iraq to be a war that had been won.
Obama threw away that victory by abandoning Iraq and opened the door for ISIS. …
Using Leon Trotsky’s admonition about war, Noah Rothman suggests how to proceed against ISIS.
… American policy has not been to eliminate it but to confine the Islamic State to its fluid borders. Barack Obama reluctantly swore to lead a multinational coalition designed to “degrade and destroy” the organization, but the practical effects of his nearly 18-month-long campaign have been to do what he admitted yesterday: to “contain” the Islamic State. The West is war-weary. We wanted nothing less than renewed war in the Middle East, but the resulting disengagement is precisely what allowed the ISIS threat to mature and to metastasize. Even if the Paris attack is linked to another terrorist network in the region, it is a clear indication that a terrorist incubator in Iraq and Syria cannot be allowed to survive. This is a proto-state that must be crushed, not only in service to the shared human values and treasures this organization has busily been destroying but in service to the preservation of national security.
No one wants perpetual war, but that is precisely what the West has invited with its displays of faltering resolution and its commitment to conduct a war with the smallest possible footprint. Meanwhile, Western values are slowly eroded as we grow more comfortable with soldiers on the streets, metadata retention programs, and theatrical displays like TSA airport screenings. There cannot be a “new normal” while one side of this conflict is continually reshaping what “normal” means. The Islamic State will not be destroyed from the air. The handful of Special Forces and U.S. advisors on the ground in Iraq and Syria cannot neutralize this threat. ISIS cannot be contained. Only an overwhelming force can accomplish the necessary task of destroying the Islamic State. What’s more, it is the responsibility of the civilized world to destroy it. …
The cartoonists have a field day.