George Rebane
We woke up to President Obama’s news conference from the G20 meeting in Turkey. Since last Friday’s Paris attacks the calls have intensified for our Community Organizer to face the reality of radical Islam expanding (see also ‘Wake up, Mr President’). At the news conference even lamestream reporters were asking the president pointed questions about the effectiveness of his entrenched Mideast strategy, especially the one he is executing against the Islamic State (more here). Obama gave each question an extended answer laced with generous dollops of pabulum that informed little but effectively ran out the clock.
What we took away from the president’s answers could be easily summarized as –
1. My strategy against ISIS continues to work and I have no intention of changing it, but now I will “intensify” it.
2. I’m already doing all that my critics are suggesting, except that I will not commit more ‘boots on the ground’ to make a difference.
3. If I put 50K troops into Iraq/Syria to defeat ISIS, then I’ll have to do the same if Al Qaeda starts acting up more in places like Yemen. And that’s not a sustainable policy.
4. What I’m doing now in the Mideast is in concord with my security team and Pentagon’s military advisers. There are no better ideas to implement.
5. And I’ll be damned if I will use the word ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic’ in any of these remarks, the closest you’ll get out of me is a reference to “ISIL’s caliphate”, so there.
No one called his assertion that what he does to defeat ISIS must necessarily be replicated in other places where Islamists are overturning existing governments. No one reminded him that he has now restructured his senior military into a cadre of compliant and career concerned flag officers who understand the rules of the game as laid down by Team Obama. (Recall it was Gen Stanley McChrystal who first told him that his Mideast policy was going off the rails.) One only hears of the surprising number of resignations and retirements from conservative media outlets which feature articles, interviews, and commentaries by these military retirees now turned media pundits.
In reality what has happened after Obama’s premature and erroneous pullout from Iraq is a Russia and Iran ascendant, and the growing chaos we have witnessed in the Mideast and Africa. And now add Europe with hordes of economic migrants flooding across its borders made up of Muslims of all ideological and theological stripe determined to pursue objectives that range from colonizing Europe to killing infidels in the centers of western civilization.
In response, western governments are today finally changing their minds about replicating Israel’s policy of building physical barriers on their southern borders to control free ingress (and abrogate EU’s Schengen Agreement). Progressives went apoplectic when this was first supported on the blogosphere (including RR). Now reason enters – better late than never. But our crack journalists (where do they get these people?) are referring to these as “a new Iron Curtain”, apparently having no clue as to the purpose and direction of movement that communism’s Iron Curtain was supposed to implement.
While France is enraged and busy “showing no mercy to ISIL”, its ability to project force with a shadow military is practically non-existent, and will have no noticeable impact on the rampaging ragheads in Syria and Iraq (or Europe). But France’s deployment may provide some backbone to America’s leadership from behind as it becomes the first real part of the fraudulently advertised ‘coalition’ that Obama claims to have set up in his grand strategy against an enemy he dare not name. The only real member of that coalition is the already-there Kurdish Peshmerga, whom we grudgingly and belatedly have begun arming.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, formerly with the CIA and now senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, writes on the possibilities of expanding the west’s efforts against radical Islam that the Paris attacks may now enable. But he too laments “President Obama’s inability to have an adult conversation about Islam’s manifest problems with modernity, which also tore Christianity apart, have kept the West’s loudest bully pulpit from provoking contentious and entirely appropriate debates among Muslims.” (more here)
Finally, President Obama concluded with his grand claim that he and his team have anticipated this course and turn of events; they knew all along that there would be “good days, and bad days”, and now Paris was one of these bad days.
This reminds me of the story of the proud and bombastic 19th century Mississippi riverboat captain who was regaling his feats while conducting a tour of the wheelhouse as the boat made its way through a particularly treacherous and winding part of the river. A visibly concerned lady asked the captain however could he with such confidence navigate his way through the half submerged trees, tricky eddies, and hull-crunching shallows visible on both sides of the steaming vessel. Grasping the big wheel firmly with one large hand, he held out the other for all to see, and proclaimed loudly, ‘Have no concern dear lady, I know this river, its tricks, and all its sandbars like the back of me hand …’ as a loud grinding sound from below brought the big vessel to a dead stop. With not so much as a blink, he concluded, ‘… why, there be one of them now!”
rebanesruminations.com 
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