{UAH} THE COLLAPSE OF OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY

The Collapse of Obama’s Foreign Policy

 

By RICH LOWRY

 

President Barack Obama’s stated goal in the fight against the Islamic State, aka ISIL, is to reduce it to a “manageable problem.”

What this means, he hasn’t spelled out in great specificity. Presumably fewer beheadings. A slower pace of Western recruiting. Fewer genocidal threats against embattled minorities. A downgrading of the caliphate to a mini-state, or merely a large swath of territory in Syria and Iraq.

The evil of ISIL has stirred nearly everyone around President Obama to ringing statements of resolve. Vice President Joe Biden says, “We will follow them to the gates of hell.” Secretary of State John Kerry tweets, “ISIL must be destroyed/will be crushed.”

 

The president himself? He says it will be “degraded to the point where it is no longer the kind of factor that we’ve seen it being over the last several months.”

Put to the rhythms of Winston Churchill’s famous call to arms in Parliament in June 1940, the Obama posture is, “We shall degrade you, we shall lessen you as a factor, we shall make you manageable, we shall hope that the attention of this great continental nation … turns to something else soon.”

What we have been witnessing the past few weeks, in real time, is the intellectual collapse of Obama’s foreign policy, accompanied by its rapid political unraveling. When Al Franken is ripping you for lacking a strategy against ISIL in Syria, you have a problem.

Obama’s view was that Al Qaeda was holed up in the badlands of Pakistan and you could drone it into submission. Then, if you stopped stirring up hornets’ nests in the Middle East, and demonstrated your good intentions, and pulled entirely out of Iraq and stayed out of Syria, you could focus on “nation building at home” and not worry about places like Mosul and Aleppo.

This, in a nutshell, was the theory of the “don’t do stupid stuff” doctrine.

Every particular was wrong.

Al Qaeda is part of a worldwide ideological movement. You could decimate its “core” in Pakistan, but it would roll on elsewhere.

Whatever we do, the hornets in the Middle East are plentiful and nasty, and hate us just as much.

Our good intentions, as Obama defines them, got us nothing. We elected a president with the middle name of Hussein who did all he could to liquidate George W. Bush’s foreign policy and made outreach to the Muslim world one of his top priorities — yet the terror threat has grown.

We pulled out of Iraq and assiduously stayed out of Syria, and now there is a caliphate stretching across the border that, in the words of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, represents “an imminent threat to every interest we have.”

The hoary hawkish clichés about the stakes in Iraq — repeated over and over again by Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham over the years — proved correct.

In a 2007 interview on “Meet the Press,” McCain argued that “the consequences of failure, in my view, are unlike the Vietnam War where we could leave and come home and it was over.”

No, McCain continued, “these people will try to follow us home and the region will erupt to a point where we may have to come back or we will be combating what is now, to a large degree, Al Qaeda, although certainly many other factors of sectarian violence, in the region.”

And so it is that six years later, we are bombing Iraq and sending what, for now, is a trickle of troops to that country as we battle an offshoot of Al Qaeda amid fears that the terrorists will attack us here at home.

It is not that the latest events in Iraq and Syria necessarily vindicate a rigorously McCainite foreign policy. You can believe ISIL must be defeated and still think that the Iraq War was a mistake and McCain and his allies are too recklessly interventionist.

 

But events have vindicated the surge that devastated the forerunner of ISIL and demonstrated the folly of Obama’s total pullout from Iraq, the point at which the country began its downward slide.

The strife-torn Middle Eastern country in which the “don’t do stupid stuff” doctrine has been most consistently applied is Syria. We didn’t invade, we didn’t bomb, we didn’t even really try to create an allied rebel force on the ground.

Yet, in a country of roughly 22 million, nearly 10 million people are refugees or internally displaced, roughly 200,000 have been killed, and ISIL has established a base from which to launch operations in Iraq.

This is not only a humanitarian catastrophe but a disaster for our interests, and more and more people are recognizing it as such.

The political worm has turned so completely that Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who the day before yesterday was scolding interventionists for their simple-mindedness, now evidently supports war in Iraq and Syria. He told The Associated Press that as president he would seek “congressional authorization to destroy [ISIL] militarily.”

The most prominent figure who is out of step with this new zeitgeist is President Obama. The other day he explained that things aren’t as bad as they seem because social media is amplifying events. He has gone from blaming George W. Bush to blaming Instagram.

Does anyone really believe that if we were reading about a radical terror group of unspeakable savagery sweeping through the Middle East in the print editions of newspapers instead of on Twitter it would seem any less alarming?

The social media excuse is another evasion by a president who wants to avoid speaking too forthrightly about the threat of ISIL, lest he commit himself to the forceful action necessary to defeat it.

When the only tool you have is a hammer, President Obama has said of President Bush’s alleged approach to the world, every problem looks like a nail. By the same token, when the only tool you have is retreat, every problem looks “manageable.”

 

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

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