President Barack Obama’s address to the nation Sunday evening was a disappointment because he did not say anything new regarding the threat this nation – and the entire world – faces from terrorists.
Obama choosing to address the nation on Sunday, an unusual day for presidential pronouncements, led many of us to believe he would announce a new tactic for degrading and destroying ISIS and its so-called caliphate.
Instead, his talk, though heartfelt, was what we have heard for months. What he has told us never varies, even as the crisis escalates. After the San Bernardino massacre and the Paris butchery, there should have been a renewed urgency in the president’s message or some new plan to destroy ISIS. There wasn’t.
Meantime, presidential candidates are crowing about how they would fix the mess. The loudest, Donald Trump, has a solution that would bar Muslims from entering the United States for an undetermined period of time. His other suggestions have included the surveillance of mosques and reintroducing water-board torture. Other critics of Obama want to introduce troops on the ground, something a sudden majority of Americans seems to support, according to polls post-San Bernardino.
These angry emotional reactions against ISIS from political candidates and the rest of us are understandable. Who wouldn’t want to see that mob of vicious killers wiped out, and the sooner the better?
Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul, whose words often get ignored or drowned out in this crowded debate season, said some insightful things earlier this week. First, he said, when the United States topples a secular dictator, chaos and anarchic butchery usually follow. Second, this nation’s attempts at nation-building in the most troubled areas of the world have had disastrous outcomes. And third, the only hope to degrade and destroy ISIS for certain will be the day when the civilized Islamic world rises up and puts an end to extremists who completely pervert the Islamic religion to suit their own bloody, power-hungry ends (ISIS, to name just one).
Rand Paul is correct. And that’s the missing piece of the anti-ISIS puzzle. Military strategists agree ISIS will never be defeated by bombing alone, that it will take boots on the ground. The question pops up: Where are these “boots” going to come from? Obama has talked for months about how countries in that region, like Saudi Arabia, are going to join the fight. But the unanswered question is this: When is that going to happen?
This battle against terrorism is so complicated, so unlike all other wars, partly because these fiends rely upon Internet propaganda to recruit gullible lunatics to their cause, a “cause” that is nothing but marauding sprees of murder and destruction. Thus, being far-flung and Internet-connected, the enemy we face is largely unseen – possibly lurking here, there and everywhere.
Destroying ISIS won’t be easy; it might not even be possible unless countries in that region of the world do the lion’s share of boots-on-the-ground combat. That is what Obama has been promising will happen; when is he going to tell us when? We are tired of waiting. We are tired of this nation and a few European countries taking sole responsibility to try to eradicate the ISIS scourge. That scourge is aimed most of all at civilized Muslims, who had better wake up to that fact before it’s too late, before the ISIS Hydra-headed monster devours them and what’s left of their countries.
