Obama should have been tougher on ISIS in speech
President Obama got the policy right, but the politics of last Sunday’s speech from the Oval Office was all wrong.
Instead of rallying the nation to feelings of security, the president delivered a lecture on the importance of tolerance. Granted, tolerance is important but it doesn’t eclipse, in the circumstance we find ourselves, giving Americans confidence that we are on the road to confronting and defeating the Islamic State, the most recent and in many ways the cruelest manifestation yet of Arab-world extremism within the larger context of Middle East unrest.
In the wake of the shooting deaths in San Bernardino and the earlier attacks in Paris, Americans are understandably on edge. The nation needed to hear from President Obama that the United States was acting with resolve and purpose, in order to provide folks with the breathing space they require and as a way to burst the bubble of anxiety we are all feeling.
This is especially true in the run-up to next year’s presidential election. We are the sad witnesses to one of the most talented demagogues we’ve had in some time, Donald Trump, who is scampering across the nation, stirring the populist pot to a boil we have not seen since George Wallace or Joe McCarthy.
The boil needed to be lanced.
Sometimes, in a democracy, leaders are required to put their ears to the ground and listen to the clamor of the people. Sometimes leaders in a democracy have to do things they do not want to do.
Here’s how the president began his Sunday speech:
“On Wednesday, 14 Americans were killed as they came together to celebrate the holidays. They were taken from family and friends who loved them deeply. They were white and black, Latino and Asian, immigrant and American-born, moms and dads, daughters and sons. Each of them served their fellow citizens. All of them were part of the American family.
“Tonight I want to talk to you about this tragedy, the broader threat of terrorism and how we can keep our country safe. …”
All of this is fine. The long first paragraph is particularly effective. It shows off the president as compassionate — as well as a leader fully cognizant of the many and varied strands of our rich and powerful nation.
Good for him. Still, it’s a sentence that would have worked elsewhere in the address, maybe even at the end as a heartfelt tribute to those who died at the hands of the ISIS-inspired, cold-blooded San Bernardino killers.
The president might have started off this way, instead:
“Tonight, over the skies of Syria, the armed forces of the United States delivered a message to the thugs of ISIL, a determined, deluded band of fanatical outlaws who threaten international order and violate every precept of the religion of Islam. That message, in the form of precision-guided missiles or “smart bombs”, was this: the United States, along with a broad coalition of nations, will not allow the apostles of hatred to get away with murder, either here in this country or elsewhere in the world.
“The world is uniting around this cardinal truth: the scourge of ISIL must be wiped from the face of the earth. …
“Let me tell you what else we are doing. …”
Now, as a matter of administration policy, this is all true. He would have been telling the bare-bones truth. The United States has dropped tons of ordnance on ISIL, spread as it is across parts of both civil war-torn Syria and poor, dysfunctional (to a great extent, thanks to us) Iraq.
And the administration has taken other steps to curb the mayhem the terrorists have tried to spread across the globe. In this, there have been some successes, first of all, by thwarting any number of plots to bring this country to it knees, including a plot that targeted Times Square.
In addition, the size of territory controlled by ISIL has shrunk appreciably, we are told, since we initiated bombing runs over Iraq in August 2014.
In summary, the president should have made clearer than he did that while ISIL is loathsome, it is no match for American power. He did say ISIL would be defeated.
The struggle to take down ISIL has more than military and intelligence components. Domestic considerations are front-and-center as well. As a result, the president should have far more dramatically ratcheted up the pressure on Congress to take part in the deliberations on ISIL — sounding, while doing so, as if he actually meant it.
Here is what President Obama said about a measure that has sat unmoved in Congress for the past year:
“If Congress believes, as I do, that we are at war with ISIL, it should go ahead and vote to authorize the continued use of military force against these terrorists.” End of discussion, next paragraph.
An alternative was to have the president announce, as a natural follow-up, that Congressional leaders would be at the White House the very next day to get to the bottom of this authorization issue.
A little presidential jaw-boning in the full glare of publicity has been known to work miracles, or at least put a veneer of national unity on an otherwise divisive situation.
The president was right to say the road ahead will be difficult. He laid out a sound plan, though as David Ignatius of the Washington Post has pointed out, there is an “empty space” at its center: the absence of a Sunni ground force willing and able to take on the sect’s ISIL fighters.
Until and unless that is solved, there is little likelihood of both overcoming ISIL and creating the “sustainable victory” the president’s speech envisions.
In any case, President Obama’s plan works out better at this point than the alternatives offered by others, including John McCain’s call for a massive U.S. ground invasion. As for Donald Trump, his proposed ban on all Muslims entering the country is the equivalent of handing ammo to the enemy.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.