Special to the AmNews
Last week, President Barack Obama caught as much flak for wearing a tan suit to a press conference as for confessing that he had no strategy for dealing with ISIS inside Syria. If the cartoonists had fun with the president’s apparel, the GOP leaders, particularly Sens. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, pounced on his admission of being null and void when it came to ISIS within Syria.
During the press conference, Obama was asked if he would seek approval from Congress for U.S. airstrikes in Syria, and he said, “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet.”
To his detractors, such admission from the nation’s commander in chief was tantamount to having no clue on what to do about ISIS and its determination to create a caliphate that will stretch across the troubled region of Iraq and Syria.
“Some of the news reports suggest that folks are getting a little further ahead of where we’re at than we currently are,” the president added.
It was just the opening the conservative hawks needed in the wake of the ISIS sweep and land grab. In an op-ed article in The New York Times last week, Graham and McCain leaped on the issue with all four feet, blasting the president for not being ready to deal with a problem that was, as they saw it, getting worse by the hour.
“The president is right to provide humanitarian relief to the Iraqi civilians stranded on Mount Sinjar and to authorize military strikes against ISIS forces that are threatening them, our Kurdish allies and our own personnel in northern Iraq,” the senators wrote.“However, these actions are far from sufficient to meet the growing threat that ISIS poses. We need a strategic approach, not just a humanitarian one.”
They further noted that a policy of containment will not work against ISIS. “It is inherently expansionist and must be stopped,” they wrote. “The longer we wait to act, the worse this threat will become, as recent events clearly show.”
Isolating and hitting ISIS forces is increasingly difficult, because they shed their arms and blend into the community at large, as they are currently in the process of doing.
All this brouhaha comes on the heels Hillary Clinton’s comments two weeks ago in Atlantic magazine in which she said “don’t do stupid stuff” is not a policy, and she criticized the president’s failure to smash ISIS when it was just beginning to emerge.
Meanwhile, the president has his hands full on the domestic front with the flareups on Staten Island, after the death of Eric Garner by an NYPD officer, and in Ferguson, Mo., after the shooting death of Michael Brown, that created firestorms of reaction that continue to simmer.
And overarching all of this is the upcoming midterm elections in which the Democrats could lose control of the Senate. It’s enough to turn a man’s hair gray and make him select a tan suit for a press conference.
