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Contents:
Obama’s ‘Strategy’ Has No Chance of Success: Frederick W. Kagan & Kimberly Kagan, Weekly Standard, Sept. 10, 2014 — President Obama just announced that he is bringing a counter-terrorism strategy to an insurgency fight.
The Humbling of a President: Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2014— Let us note briefly the commanding irony of Barack Obama delivering—hours before 9/11—the anti-terrorism speech that history required of his predecessor after September 11, 2001.
ISIS Is Not Islamic?: Daniel Pipes, National Review, Sept. 10, 2014—In a televised address this evening, President Barack Obama outlined his ideas on how to defeat the Islamic State. Along the way, he declared the organization variously known as ISIS or ISIL to be "not Islamic."
Tough on ISIS? Iran Senses U.S. Weakness: Jonathan S. Tobin, Commentary, Sept. 10, 2014 — After weeks of indecision, President Obama is finally, albeit in a limited manner, mustering U.S. strength to respond to the challenge from ISIS terrorists.
Thirteen Years After 9/11, Western Leaders Still Don’t Understand the Jihadist Threat: Clifford D. May, National Post, Sept. 11, 2014— Do not call what happened 13 years ago this week a tragedy. It was a terrorist atrocity, an act of war and a war crime. Very different.
Statement by the President on ISIL: White House Press Secretary, Sept. 10, 2014
Inside the Speech: Obama’s New ISIS Strategy: Colleen McCain Nelson, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2014
Tehran's Boots on the Ground: Kate Brannen, Foreign Policy, Sept. 10, 2014
9/11 Called: James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2014
OBAMA’S ‘STRATEGY’ HAS NO CHANCE OF SUCCESS
Frederick W. Kagan & Kimberly Kagan
Weekly Standard, Sept. 10, 2014
President Obama just announced that he is bringing a counter-terrorism strategy to an insurgency fight. He was at pains to repeat the phrase “counter-terror” four times in a short speech. Noting that ISIL is not a state (partly because the international community thankfully does not recognize it), he declared, “ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.” Neither of those sentences, unfortunately, is true.
ISIL is an insurgent group that controls enormous territory in Iraq and Syria that it governs. It maneuvers conventional light infantry forces supported by vehicles mounting machine guns and occasionally armored personnel carriers against the regular forces of the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish Peshmerga—and wins. It is purely and simply not a terrorist organization any longer. Neither is it the simple manifestation of nihilistic evil the president makes out.
ISIL has described a very clear vision of seizing control of all of the territory of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. It intends to abolish all of the borders and redraw them according to a new structure of governance suitable to its hateful version of an old Islamic heresy. That vision also makes it more than a simple terrorist organization. It’s awfully hard to develop a sound strategy when you start by mis-diagnosing the problem so profoundly. That’s why the “strategy” the president just announced has no chance of success.
Daniel Henninger
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2014
Let us note briefly the commanding irony of Barack Obama delivering—hours before 9/11—the anti-terrorism speech that history required of his predecessor after September 11, 2001. There is one thing to say: If we are lucky, President Obama will hand off to his successor a terrorist enemy as diminished as the one George Bush, David Petraeus and many others left him. If we're lucky.
There is a story about Mr. Obama relevant to the war, battle or whatever he declared Wednesday evening against the Islamic State, aka ISIS. It is found in his former campaign manager David Plouffe's account of the 2008 election, "The Audacity to Win." Mr. Plouffe writes that during an earlier election race, Mr. Obama had a "hard time allowing his campaign staff to take more responsibility." To which Barack Obama answered: "I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I'll hire to do it." Audacity indeed. In a 2008 New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, Mr. Obama is quoted telling another aide: "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors." Also, "I think I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters."
And here we are. In the days before Mr. Obama's ISIS address to the nation, news accounts cataloged his now-embarrassing statements about terrorism's decline on his watch—the terrorists are JV teams, the tide of war is receding and all that. Set aside that Mr. Obama outputted this viewpoint even as Nigeria's homicidal Boko Haram kidnapped 275 schoolgirls, an act that appalled and galvanized the world into "Bring Back Our Girls." No matter. Boko Haram slaughtered on, unabated.Some of these gaffes came in offhand comments, but others were embedded in formal speeches from the presidential pen, such as the definitive Obama statement on terrorism last May at the National Defense University: "So that's the current threat—lethal yet less-capable al Qaeda affiliates." A year later, ISIS seized one-third of Iraq inside a week.
Worse than misstatements have been the misdecisions on policy: the erased red line in Syria, the unattainable reset with Vladimir Putin's brainwashed Russia, the nuclear deal with the ruling shadows in Iran. The first two bad calls have pitched significant regions of the world into crises of virtually unmanageable complexity. What we now know is that Mr. Obama is not even close to being his own best Secretary of State, his own best Secretary of Defense, his own best national security adviser or his own best CIA director. The question is: Does he know it? Can a humbling experience of such startling proportions have sunk in? It had better. What the U.S. needs if it is to prevail in the battle Mr. Obama put forth Wednesday is the genuine article of presidential leadership. What the U.S. does not need in the Oval Office is a utility infielder playing everyone else's position. We are competing against global terrorism's heaviest hitters, who have established state seizure as a strategic goal.
If Mr. Obama still thinks he's better than Susan Rice, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and John Brennan, then he and the nation supporting his anti-ISIS effort are being poorly served. He should fire them all and bring in people who know more about fighting terrorists than he does. Barack Obama admires Abraham Lincoln. Act like him. Appoint the best people and let them win it. Winning would also require a president willing to confront the political correctness that has undermined the U.S.'s battle against terror. No more sophistry about whether a Benghazi qualifies as terrorism. After the videotaped beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, is anyone still lying awake at night worrying that their iPhone number is among millions of others in the National Security Agency's data mines? Closing Gitmo goes on the backburner. "Boots on the ground"—kill that too. It has become code for boots going nowhere, as Mr. Obama's airpower-only campaign made clear Wednesday evening.
It has taken 13 years to this day, September 11, for the reality of global Islamic terrorism to finally sink in—here in the U.S. and everywhere else, including the ever-equivocal capitals of the Middle East. In the years after 9/11 came London, Madrid, the Boston Marathon, multiple failed attempts to bomb New York City, Mumbai, Kenya, Boko Haram, the re-rocketing of Tel Aviv, Christian holy places destroyed, thousands of Arabs blown up in the act of daily life. That's the short list. ISIS is just the tip of the world's unstable iceberg. We're all living on the Titanic. Now a reluctant progressive president goes to war without admitting it is war. It's even money at best that he or the Left will stay the course if the going gets tough beyond Iraq's borders.
A final irony. In that National Defense speech, Mr. Obama defended the drone killing in Yemen of the American-born jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki: "His citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team." If Barack Obama would put a plaque with those words on his Oval Office desk, the world's innocents may have a shot at defeating the world's snipers. A long shot.
Daniel Pipes
National Review, Sept. 10, 2014
In a televised address this evening, President Barack Obama outlined his ideas on how to defeat the Islamic State. Along the way, he declared the organization variously known as ISIS or ISIL to be "not Islamic."
In making this preposterous claim, Obama joins his two immediate predecessors in pronouncing on what is not Islamic. Bill Clinton called the Taliban treatment of women and children "a terrible perversion of Islam." George W. Bush deemed that 9/11 and other acts of violence against innocents "violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith."
None of the three has any basis for such assertions. To state the obvious: as non-Muslims and politicians, rather than Muslims and scholars, they are in no position to declare what is Islamic and what is not. As Bernard Lewis, a leading American authority of Islam, notes: "it is surely presumptuous for those who are not Muslims to say what is orthodox and what is heretical in Islam." (That Obama was born and raised a Muslim has no relevance here, for he left the faith and cannot pronounce on it.) Indeed, Obama compounds his predecessors' errors and goes further: Clinton and Bush merely described certain actions (treatment of women and children, acts of violence against innocents) as un-Islamic, but Obama has dared to declare an entire organization (and quasi-state) to be "not Islamic." The only good thing about this idiocy? At least it's better than the formulation by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (known as CAIR) which has the nerve to call ISIS "anti-Islamic."
In the end, though, neither U.S. presidents nor Islamist apologists fool people. Anyone with eyes and ears realizes that ISIS, like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda before it, is 100 percent Islamic. And most Westerners, as indicated by detailed polling in Europe, do have eyes and ears. Over time, they are increasingly relying on common sense to conclude that ISIS is indeed profoundly Islamic.
TOUGH ON ISIS? IRAN SENSES U.S. WEAKNESS
Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary, Sept. 10, 2014
After weeks of indecision, President Obama is finally, albeit in a limited manner, mustering U.S. strength to respond to the challenge from ISIS terrorists. But at the same time, another dangerous Islamist power is sensing U.S. weakness in its struggle to build a nuclear weapon. The latest news about Iranian maneuvering prior to the resumption of the nuclear talks with the West provides a stark contrast to any talk about a more muscular Obama foreign policy.
As the New York Times reports today, Iran is going full speed ahead with a diplomatic campaign to undermine Western sanctions aimed at forcing them to come to terms on a nuclear agreement. Secretary of State John Kerry began the process of weakening and perhaps dismantling the restrictions on doing business with Iran last fall in the hope that this would lead Tehran to meet him at least halfway and sign another weak accord that might let them keep their nuclear program while committing them to not build a bomb. But in the months that have followed Kerry’s interim deal, the Iranians have not played ball. Instead, they have reverted to their pattern of previous negotiations in which they have stalled and continued to try to run out the clock until it is too late to stop them. While some sources close to the negotiations claim that a final agreement is possible and may even be within reach, Iran’s public stance and its diplomatic offensive leave the impression that they are standing firm and will agree to nothing that ultimately limits their ability to build a bomb.
The Obama administration’s zeal for a deal with Iran is no secret. Nor is the president’s desire to craft a new détente with Tehran. That impulse is only strengthened by the fact that both Iran and the U.S. view the ISIS terrorists as an enemy. As I wrote last week, the administration’s belated realization that letting ISIS flourish in Syria and Iraq was a colossal error is leading some to conclude that it should work together with the Iranian regime in an attempt to crush the group. But while it is to be hoped that the U.S. and Iran will not clash in Iraq, no one should trust Tehran or its motives in intervening against ISIS. Nor should this temporary confluence of interests be allowed to impact the U.S. effort to stop Iran from going nuclear.
But unfortunately, the mixed signals coming from Washington about Iran are already being interpreted abroad as indicating the administration’s lack of resolve on the nuclear issue. As the Times notes, Iran seems to be making progress in getting Russia (which is always happy to thwart U.S. interests on any issue even if it makes no sense for the Putin regime to let their Iranian neighbor acquire a bomb) and South Africa to think about backing away from sanctions or openly breaching them. And so long as the U.S. is behaving as if the nuclear issue is not a priority and that increasing, rather than weakening the restrictions in the coming year is on the table (a prospect that the administration quashed when it was proposed by Congress), it’s hard to blame these countries and others who are tempted to do business with Iran, that Obama doesn’t care much about the issue.
But whatever the administration is planning to do in the talks or if they fail, the Iranians seem determined to prepare themselves to withstand any pressure from the West. They are secure in the knowledge that Obama will never use force against them and that America’s allies and partners in the negotiations will crumble even if the president will not. Under those circumstances they have little incentive to be reasonable in the talks. President Obama is reluctantly bringing the U.S. into the war on ISIS. But unless he wakes up and starts acting in a manner that will cause the Iranians to fear the consequences of trying to keep their nuclear program, he may face an even more dangerous conflict against a country on the verge of gaining a nuke.
THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER 9/11, WESTERN LEADERS STILL
DON’T UNDERSTAND THE JIHADIST THREAT
Clifford D. May
National Post, Sept. 11, 2014
Do not call what happened 13 years ago this week a tragedy. It was a terrorist atrocity, an act of war and a war crime. Very different. The self-proclaimed jihadis responsible for hijacking commercial jets and using them as missiles targeted the World Trade Center because it was a Western financial capital, a place where men and women of many ethnicities and religions worked in peace to create prosperity. Another plane was flown into the Pentagon — brains of the greatest liberation army the world has even known. One more jet was meant to hit the political heart of the Free World — the Capitol or the White House — but Americans on that flight refused to surrender and thereby won a battle.
September 11 was not a date chosen at random. I’m inclined to credit the explanation offered by the late Christopher Hitchens, a man of the left who dissented from the left’s tendency to condone savagery directed at Americans. “It was on September 11, 1683 that the conquering armies of Islam were met, held, and thrown back at the gates of Vienna,” he wrote in The Guardian on Oct. 2, 2001. That defeat of the Ottoman Empire and Islamic caliphate was “a hinge-event in human history,” he added. From then on, “it was more likely that Christian or Western powers would dominate the Muslim world than the other way around.” Most Muslims do not seethe over a 17th century war any more than most Americans nurse a grudge against the descendants of King George III. But those whom we have come to call Islamists regard the failure of Muslim forces to conquer Europe as “a humiliation in itself and a prelude to later ones.”
Mr. Hitchens added one more observation, particularly relevant this summer: “The forces of the Islamic Jihad in Gaza once published a statement saying that they could not be satisfied until all of Spanish Andalusia had been restored to the faithful as well.” Those who understand such matters know that 9/11 was not about America’s chickens “coming home to roost,” as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright unforgettably characterized the murder of 3,000 Americans. Nor was it a protest against imperialism, colonialism and occupation — an attempt to address “legitimate grievances.” It was about a vision of the past and the future. It was about power and, uncomfortably, about faith. The actions that Western leaders have taken to counter this threat have been insufficient. Al Qaeda and its affiliates now operate in more countries than ever. An AQ splinter, the Islamic State, has seized much of Syria and Iraq, declaring a caliphate — a successor to the one defeated at Vienna. The Muslim Brotherhood — an organization whose motto includes the phrase “jihad is our way” — is regarded favorably by those who lead Turkey, a NATO ally, and rule Qatar where the U.S. maintains a military base and American universities and think tanks have established campuses.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is keeping its eye on the ball — the ball being nuclear weapons, the great equalizer, although equality is not at all what Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have in mind. They are not co-operating with an International Atomic Energy Agency investigation into “the possible military dimensions” of their nuclear program. If they do obtain a nuclear capability, the odds increase that a nuclear exchange will occur, and/or that nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of terrorists. Iran and al Qaeda are rivals but they have cooperated in the past and are likely to do so against common enemies again. By now, we get that, right?
In New Hampshire last week, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden called those fighting for the Islamic State “barbarians,” melodramatically adding that the Obama administration will “follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice, because hell is where they will reside.” But the very same day, Secretary of State John Kerry chose to change the subject, making the bizarre suggestion that it is America’s religious “duty” to confront climate change — which he has previously called “the biggest challenge of all that we face right now — not least because “Muslim-majority countries are among the most vulnerable.”
Coincidently, this also was the week that Matt Ridley, a science journalist and member of the British House of Lords, pointed out that “the climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.”
That does not imply climate change is not a concern; it does imply it’s not our “biggest challenge.” How inconvenient for the many politicians who would rather fight carbon emissions than jihadis, who are more concerned about you and me driving SUVs than Iranian mullahs spinning centrifuges. For such politicians, required reading ought to include Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan’s most recent essay on the West’s disconcerting return to “the realism of the 1930s.” The fundamental grievance of the illiberal and atavistic forces on the march back then, he observes, was no different from that of illiberal and atavistic forces on the march now: “being forced to live in a world shaped by others.”
Thirteen years after 9/11, the world shaped by Judeo-Christian values and the Enlightenment is undeniably imperfect. But are we willing to let al Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Islamic Republic and the Muslim Brotherhood re-structure it for our children? The jihadis want the job. And they are more passionate about their beliefs than most of us: more willing — even eager — to kill and be killed to spread them. Thirteen years after 9/11, it’s probably time to decide whether we’re capable of a serious response.
Statement by the President on ISIL: White House Press Secretary, Sept. 10, 2014 —My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.
Inside the Speech: Obama’s New ISIS Strategy: Colleen McCain Nelson, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2014—Here are some of the details as outlined by the White House and an explanation of what they mean.
Tehran's Boots on the Ground: Kate Brannen, Foreign Policy, Sept. 10, 2014 —When U.S. President Barack Obama makes his speech Wednesday night about taking on the Islamic State, he's sure to mention the nine countries that have signed on to aid the United States in the fight.
9/11 Called: James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2014—"President Barack Obama is set to propose Wednesday night a significantly expanded military offensive against Islamic State militants," The Wall Street Journal reports…
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