Last week, President Barack Obama delivered a primetime speech to outline his plans for war against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).
The decision to use military force is a stark contrast to the much different rhetoric espoused by candidate Obama in 2008. In those heady days, he solemnly guaranteed that he would extricate the United States military from the Middle East.
“[O]n my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war,” brash candidate Obama promised in a 2008 New York Times op-ed.
The Obama administration pulled the last combat troops out of Iraq in December 2011.
In a self-confident November 2012 tweet, the @BarackObama Twitter account — which is festooned with an Organizing For Action logo and which advertises www.barackobama.com — proudly boasted that “President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq.”
President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq: pic.twitter.com/6kz7Fduh
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 6, 2012
In the 20 months since Obama withdrew all combat troops from Iraq, the resulting power vacuum has been quickly filled by Sunni radicals with dreams of Middle East domination.
In last week’s speech, Obama laid out a strategy to contain the fast-growing jihadi group. The aim of the cautious strategy is to defeat ISIS without angering the president’s progressive base. Obama failed to name any allies willing to help the United States. (RELATED: Obama Offers Cautious War Plan Against ISIS)
The belated strategy comes after Obama’s admission in August that the White House had no strategy to deal with ISIS.
In June 2014, ISIS — which now calls itself simply “the Islamic State” — took the next logical step in its quest to turn a huge swath of newly-captured territory in the Middle East into a radical Sunni empire by announcing the formation of a new “caliphate” spanning across substantial parts of both Syria and Iraq. (RELATED: Don’t Be Alarmed But Radical Muslims Just Declared Their Own Empire Across Much Of Middle East)
On Sept. 12, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said “the United States is at war with” ISIS during a routine midday press briefing. The previous day, Sept. 11, Secretary of State John Kerry described the U.S. strategy against ISIS not as a war but as “a major counter-terrorism operation that will have many different moving parts.” (RELATED: So The U.S. Is At War With ISIS, White House Says)
In July, a ranking Pentagon official criticized the Obama administration’s angst and inaction in the Middle East in an exclusive statement to The Daily Caller. (RELATED: Pentagon Official: Situation in Iraq Is ‘So F**ked’)
“The Pentagon is split and the administration is paralyzed,” the official said, calling the gridlock “horrendous.” “People are putting targeting packets through unnecessary bureaucracy” and White House lawyers “are notorious for wasting time and looking for an excuse to say ‘No.'”
Despite several authorizations of the use of military force including Congress’s 2003 authorization for the Iraq war, the United States hasn’t officially declared any war since World War II.
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