This is from an op-ed piece by the two senators in National Review:
President Obama cannot avoid his share of responsibility for the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). As dangerous as ISIS is now, its rise was neither inevitable nor unpredictable. Time after time, President Obama had the opportunity to act when U.S. engagement could have made a decisive difference, and in pulling back from America’s traditional leadership role, he left a vacuum for other, more dangerous actors to fill. As a result, the situation in Iraq and Syria has descended into a crisis that poses a direct threat to the United States. Worse yet, our options for countering this threat are fewer and far worse than they were just a few years ago.
At least four of President Obama’s key decisions stand out…
Boiled down, the four are:
- The “failure to leave a residual force in Iraq in 2011.”
- In 2012, “when President Obama’s entire senior national-security team — Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CIA Director David Petraeus, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey — identified the threat posed by radicalization in Syria and recommended a proposal to arm and train elements of the moderate Syrian opposition.”
- “President Obama’s decision not to strike the Assad regime in September 2013 after Assad crossed the president’s own red line…”
- “Finally, in the fall of 2013, President Obama refused to launch targeted strikes against ISIS in Iraq when some U.S officials and Iraqi leaders were urging him to do so…”
Hindsight is indeed 20/20, but in this case, a lot of people were seeing trouble back then, and trying to tell the president. Of the four, I continue to find No. 2 the most startling. That wasn’t about the president’s political opponents second-guessing him. It was about him ignoring his whole team.
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Having been watching Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts” on PBS (great, by the way) I see a lot of similarities between Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama in how they view the world and the role of the United States in the world.
Now that I’m finishing my MacArthur biography, I need to put one of TR in the queue. He won’t be next, though. The man on-deck is Chester Nimitz.
Pun intended, right?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Woodrow Wilson kept us out of war, at least for a while, and American casualties in WW I were low. Had he stuck to his guns we would have suffered zero casualties and not had Hitler to contend with.
See, that’s the problem with pacifists. They never stick to their guns…
I see what you did there.
There really isn’t much else to say about Graham and McCain. They’ve been wrong about everything related to issues in the middle-east and yet they keep on spouting their discredited nonsense. Free speech is a part of what makes us a great nation so let them have at it. But they have no more to offer than the Westboro Baptist Church.
I have to suspect that there’s a slant to the understanding of the facts when the op-ed is from 2 people of the same party. When it’s to people of the same political party who both have highly similar ways of thinking about the subject, I think I had better double check the facts before taking them at face value, and I haven’t had time to check these. Has anyone checked them from an independent source?