President Obama’s ISIS Address takes a necessary though contingent step in the right direction. On the positive side, the president declared unambiguously why the United States must defeat ISIS after months of denying and underestimating the threat. He prepared the American people for a campaign of long duration, outlining a four-part strategy for achieving victory entailing airstrikes in Syria and Iraq and supporting military partners on the ground. Obama pledged finally to arm “moderate” elements of the Syrian opposition, an option that he had long resisted and disparaged as recently as a month ago to in an interview with Tom Friedman of the New York Times, calling the notion that arming Syrian rebels would have made the difference “a fantasy.”
Credit the President, too, for categorically rejecting any alliance of convenience against ISIS with murderous anti-American regime of Bashir Assad. Obama’s tone conveyed substantially more resolution than his startling previous admission that he had not yet formulated a strategy, and his initial assessment that the United States could settle for reducing ISIS to “a manageable problem” rather than defeating it.
Yet what President Obama said and did not say in his ISIS address raises serious questions about his determination to achieve victory and his conception of it. Start with Obama’s emphatic and delusional denial of the Islamist dimension of the ISIS threat. The president remains mulishly obtuse to the critical distinction eminent scholar and commentator Daniel Pipes draws between Islam, the religion with which the United States has no quarrel, and Islamism, an ideology demanding man’s complete adherence to strict religious law. The Islamism that ISIS exemplifies constitutes the moral and geopolitical equivalent of fascism, which the United States must stoutly oppose in all its manifestations.
The president’s wishful thinking about radical Islamists accounts, likewise, for many of his most egregious foreign policy blunders in the Middle East: engaging revolutionary theocracy in Iran, initially embracing the virulently anti-American Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, envisaging the increasingly Islamist regime of Recep Ergodan in Turkey as a partner rather than adversary, and treating a fanatical Hamas in Gaza as the moral equivalent of a decent, democratic Israel. So Obama’s ISIS address does not robustly reassure that the president truly knows the implacability of the enemy the United States faces.
Nor does the president’s emphasis on what the United States will not do inspire confidence in his ability or resolution to defeat ISIS decisively. The president portrays his strategy toward ISIS as analogous to what “we have pursued successfully against Yemen and Somalia for years.” Yet Yemen and Somalia remain hotbeds of terrorism despite U.S. airstrikes that have killed high level terrorist leaders and operatives. ISIS is, moreover, a formidable adversary that will require considerably more exertion to defeat than the terrorist threat emanating from either of these countries.
Even more problematic, the president has categorically ruled out American forces having a “combat mission — we will not get involved in another ground war in Iraq.” Instead, the United States will rely exclusively on Iraqi military, Kurds, and the Syrian opposition to provide the requisite ground forces to defeat ISIS. Is that really prudent? Can an Iraqi Army that has performed poorly to date successfully divest ISIS of the five oil fields and two refineries in Northern Iraq essential for financing its ferocious and relentless campaign? Wouldn’t achieving that vital objective at least require American special forces at a minimum?
Moreover, will a truly effective international coalition as yet unspecified truly materialize? Or is Jeff Shesol writing in the New Yorker right to mock Obama’s coalition as “willing and unable”? What has so suddenly and drastically changed to explain President Obama’s newfound confidence that that the Syrian opposition he derided as “former doctors, farmers, pharmacologists and so forth” incapable of standing up to Assad can serve as effective proxies for American ground forces? Will Obama truly employ American air power massively, decisively, immediately and simultaneously to ravage ISIS’s logistical tail in Syria, eviscerate ISIS’s combat capabilities in Iraq, and deny ISIS the freedom of movement on which its rampage depends?
What happens if f American air power, logistical support, and the motley amalgam of ground forces at the coalition’s disposal does not suffice to stop ISIS? Will the Obama Administration reconsider its self-imposed limits? Or will the president make withdrawal rather than victory the priority as he did in Iraq and Afghanistan, massively damaging American credibility while emboldening aggressors everywhere?
The president’s born-again hawkishness against ISIS coincides with plummeting poll numbers indicating that most Americans consider him woefully weak in responding to mounting foreign dangers. The latest NBC/WSJ poll finds that Republicans enjoy a an 18 point advantage on which party deals best with foreign policy and a 38 point advantage on which party best ensures national defense. For all its tougher rhetoric, the president’s ISIS speech still does not dispel legitimate concerns that expedience rather than conviction drives the president’s strategy. President Obama has yet to demonstrate that he truly understands the enemy and has overcome his enervating inhibitions to use force decisively.
Hope therefore that the president’s speech is just the beginning of his evolution toward greater strategic clarity and resolution. Hope that the President does not flinch this time from enforcing his red line he did fecklessly with Assad in Syria. Otherwise, the United States and our allies will pay a stiff price, not just in the Middle East.