About the President's policy vis-a-vis the Islamic State, Douthat writes:
Across years of war and at an extraordinary cost, the United States built an army that was supposed to prevent jihadists from gaining a sanctuary in the heart of the Middle East.Douthat says to succeed against the IS, we either put troops on the ground ourselves or we ally with Assad against the rebels. Obama is willing to do neither.
That army was the Iraqi Army, and we know what happened next.
American-organized units were routed; American-trained soldiers fled; American-made weapons fell into the hands of the Islamic State.
Our official strategy for fighting the Islamic State involves basically trying the same thing again, this time on the cheap: inventing allies, funneling them money and weaponry, and telling ourselves that it will all work out.
If our failure to build an army capable of stabilizing Iraq after our departure looks like a pure tragedy, then the arm-the-rebels gambit in Syria has more than a whiff of farce. But really it’s a studied evasion.
The cold reality, though, is that defeating ISIS outright in Syria will take something more substantial than dropping a few bombs in support of a few U.S.-trained moderates.
To borrow a sports metaphor, Obama is trying to "run out the clock," to appear to do enough militarily to mollify Americans for the next two years. It forces his successor to clean up the mess he leaves behind. Another wuss - Carter - left behind our hostages in Iran instead of manning up and doing something about it.
