Obama discards his no boots on the ground pledgeBY ANDREW MALCOLM
President Obama, just back from the ongoing Paris climate summit, is stuck on his doomsday global warming kick. But if like most Americans you disapprove of the Democrat's so far ineffectual strategy against ISIS, stick around a few minutes. It'll change.
It did again Tuesday. For the better, if you'd like to see the terrorist army's globally-growing tentacles addressed in a lethal way.
Here, briefly, is Obama's tangled history with ISIS:
23 months ago he dismissed it as the JV. Seven months later he admitted no strategy to address the rampaging radical jihadist horde of rapists, beheaders, executioners and crucifiers conquering broad territories in Syria and the Iraq that Obama exited so hastily in 2011.
Remember Obama has frequently assured his party: "
I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria." After ISIS publicly beheaded an American hostage, Obama vowed to "degrade and ultimately defeat" it. He announced a half-hearted strategy of bombing and an expensive training program for so-called moderate Syrian rebels. Both flopped.
The training program cost north of $40 million and produced, wait for it,- about a dozen fighters, status currently unknown.
The air campaign was so hamstrung by Obama's rules of engagement that 75% of the planes returned with their ordnance. Frustrated pilots tell of orders to drop leaflets announcing raids hours or a day before attacks, providing ample time for ISIS to move/hide troops and gear.
This fall Obama dispatched 50 Special Ops forces to place experienced eyes inside the fragile coalition of anti-Assad forces. One Delta Force member died in a firefight, but Obama aides grotesquely denied it was combat.
Two weeks ago the president assured ABC News that ISIS was "contained." Oops! That night its followers exploded that claim and suicide vests in Paris, killing 130.
Tuesday as Obama droned on in that same city about global warming, which he calls the worst national security threat facing America, his secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford appeared before the House Armed Services Committee.
We've slightly edited a C-SPAN video of their testimony below here. The interplay is revealing. News bits include:
Obama is "deploying a specialized expeditionary targeting force to assist Iraqi and Peshmerga forces." These Special Ops guys, perhaps around 200 to start, will "over time be able to conduct raids, free hostages, gather intel and capture ISIL leaders."
But wait! There's more from Carter. "
This force will also be in a position to conduct unilateral operations in Syria." Members will presumably wear boots on that ground.
Under direct questioning,
the Marine general contradicted Obama: "We have not contained ISIL."
During the 83 interminable months of this presidency we've all learned that Obama's intellectual insecurities render him incapable of admitting mistakes. Red line. ObamaCare. New job creation. Benghazi video. Et al.
Obama will never acknowledge under-estimating ISIS. That won't matter if this new deployment starts a serious bid to degrade and ultimately destroy it. But if it's yet another tardy half-measure to run out the next 414 days, that'll loom as a far larger legacy than Obama's global-warming hot air.
http://news.investors.com/politics-andrew-malcolm/120215-783307-special-ops-forces-sent-into-syria-against-isis.htm
