By any measure, President Obama’s speech to the nation Sunday night was a remarkable effort but doubtless not in the way he intended.
From our perspective, he removed all doubt about whether he has it in him to come up with a viable policy to address the ISIS threat. And we got the sense that he has resigned himself to never having one.
Indeed, he seemed intent on focusing on diversionary issues to draw attention away from this transparent failure.
To be sure, the president came closer than ever to mentioning Islam and terror in one sentence and asserting that the Muslim community has a special responsibility:
We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam.… That does not mean denying the fact that an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities. This is a real problem that Muslims must confront, without excuse.
And of the two Muslim perpetrators of the San Bernardino massacre he said, “It is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization. So this was an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people.”
Further, tacitly acknowledging the role of ISIS, he announced an intensification of air strikes against its positions and spoke of heightened efforts to capture and kill its leaders.
Unfortunately, that was it in terms of combating ISIS. No new initiatives; he specifically eschewed any intention to introduce any ground troops to take the battle to ISIS. This despite the plain failure of air strikes to pacify ISIS in any meaningful way, as witness the spate of attacks either directed by ISIS or independently carried out by its followers in six countries since October 10. More than 500 people have been killed in those attacks outside the area ISIS controls.
The president also raised some collateral issues plainly intended to distract from the issue at hand. So, for example, he asked Congress to enact restrictions on gun ownership. We must, he said “make it harder for [terrorists] to kill.” But does anyone really believe highly motivated ISIS acolytes such as the San Bernardino killers would find general restrictions a significant impediment?
And he delivered himself of some extraordinarily shallow pap: “Even in this political season, even as we properly debate what steps I and future presidents must take to keep our country safe, let’s make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional. Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear.”
He also spent an inordinate amount of time telling us we should not let the current difficulties result in the targeting of members of the American Muslim community. We have heard this before and still haven’t seen any studies that this has been occurring in statistically significant numbers.
What we have seen is U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announcing a heightened effort to prosecute “hate speech” directed at Muslim Americans. Ms. Lynch noted that there have been some 11,000 investigations of allegations of such hate speech since 9/11 – which have resulted in but 45 prosecutions.
Hateful and bigoted remarks directed at one’s religious or ethnic background should indeed be out of the bounds of acceptable public discourse, but we cannot dismiss out of hand the notion that there is a need for special covert intelligence operations – meticulously designed so as not to cavalierly encroach on the rights we all enjoy as Americans – to uncover plots that might be percolating among some segments of the Muslim community.
Finally, given the failures of some of our forays into the Middle East in recent years, we certainly sympathize with President Obama’s reluctance to commit American troops to the fight against ISIS. But for someone charged with protecting the homeland and America’s crucial role in the world, that concern can only be the beginning of the inquiry, not its end.