During today’s White House press briefing, a reporter asks spokesman Josh Earnest a simple question: “What does victory (over ISIS) look like here?”
Earnest turns the serious question into a joke: “I didn’t bring my Webster’s Dictionary with me.”
Har har.
Let’s briefly go over what we’ve learned recently.
The president does not believe that the Islamic State is Islamic.
The president claimed that national security is his highest priority, yet he has not secured the border and has no intention of doing so.
The president has replaced “Don’t do stupid sh*t,” his previous foreign policy guidestar, with “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.” That’s hardly a new principle to American foreign policy, though it is evidently new to Barack Obama.
The president believes that Yemen and Somalia are models for effective counterterrorism against Islamic State. Terrorists freely operate in both countries, though they are subject to the occasional setback via US drone strike. Drone operations in both countries, using that term loosely, show no signs of actually destroying the terrorist groups operating in them.
The president who accused Bush of “going it alone” in Iraq refuses to consult Congress, and is going into his non-war versus Islamic State with a much smaller coalition than Bush had going into Iraq.
Among the coalition he has assembled is the Free Syrian Army, which is known to be in alliance with IS — the enemy.
The president, through his spokesman, has not even defined what victory over IS will look like.
Oh yeah, this is going to work out real well.
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