Those who early on said that President Obama’s strategy to “degrade and defeat” the Islamic State — the words and aims are Mr. Obama’s — was ludicrously insufficient are finding those concerns being borne out.
On the front page of Wednesday’s USA Today is a picture with this caption: “ISIL close to seizing strategic Syrian town: Smoke rises from Kobani, Syria, as seen from the Turkish side of the border. Despite U.S.-led airstrikes, Islamic State militants are still encroaching, indicating President Obama’s no-ground-troops strategy may not be working.”
Reporting on the same event, the New York Times puts things this way:
A Kurdish official in Kobani, Assi Abdullah, said that despite the bombing, Islamic State fighters had managed to enter new areas of the town and move north, closer to the border.
That development, along with what could be seen of the fighting from across the border, suggested that two days of intensive airstrikes had failed to turn back the militants. Kurdish fighters, as well as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have said that airstrikes alone will not stop the attackers.
These reports should be combined with this one, a Wall Street Journal story that reports, “Islamic State appears to have largely withstood the airstrikes so far and with scant pressure on the ground in Iraq and Syria, the militants have given up little of the territory they captured before the campaign began.”
“The strikes are useless so far,” said Mohammad Hassan, an activist in eastern Syria battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad. “Most of the training camps and the bases were empty when the coalition hit them.”
(On Saturday Islamic State fighters seized the Iraqi town of Kubaisa, located in western Anbar province, “its latest conquest in the desert region where it has chalked up a string of victories, a military official and people fleeing the scene said.” This comes two days after the fall of Hit and as the Islamic State sought to consolidate control in towns west of Ramadi.)
What’s happening was easy to predict when the president announced his plan to defeat the Islamic State without “boots on the ground”; it’s now being confirmed by facts on the ground.
Mr. Obama is waging this war in a slapdash fashion. (He is reluctant even to refer to this conflict as a war.) His approach is de minimis, a trifling, “defined mainly by its limitations,” according to the Washington Post. Unless he fundamentally alters his approach, the president has no chance to achieve his stated goal. The result may be the Islamic State, having withstood our strikes, will be seen as the “strong horse” in the Middle East. America, thanks to Mr. Obama, will be seen as the “weak horse.” And we know what that led to last time. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” So said Osama bin Laden shortly after 9/11.
Has Barack Obama learned nothing since then?
