Who's In Charge?

Lately, the president of the U.S. has been talking about ISIS/ISIL, the radical Islamist army that is wreaking havoc and murdering people in Iraq... and, it seems, in Syria.

The UN has condemned them and accused them of war crimes. I would say they do not care. They use videos of the brutal beheadings of journalists as "recruitment" tools. They have (and this is, to me, insane) a lot of European and Americans in this army of cutthroats. There is little we can actually do about them; we can bomb them, kill them using drones, support materially the forces willing to fight them but we will not wipe them out... no matter how much we might want to. They threaten to come to the U.S. and Europe and attack us.

The president talks about them like they can be "managed" and he talks about building coalitions in Europe and among the Arab nations. He seems to think this is the way to go. I think that is not what people anywhere in the world want to hear. They want to hear that the U.S. will not tolerate the existence of this army; that it will bring the force of the American might to bear on them and do its level best to irradicate them. You will note that I already said we cannot actually do that. And I stand by that. However, that does not mean we should not try, that we should not confront them. We must. It is incredibly stupid not to.

Work on those coalitions, build (or try to) those alliances that we know will be needed, but talk tough and pretend we are not the "paper tiger" we have become over the years. A leader's job is not to wilt under the lack of support by the people but to build that support, to be a leader.

Sadly, we do not have one today. We have a president who is unwilling to actually confront Putin over his land grabs in the Ukraine, who waffles about supporting those willing to fight ISIS/ISIL, who doesn't think our border to the south is all that important, who is seemingly willing to let Iran build nuclear weapons, and who seems more concerned about his golf game than the country he is sworn to protect.

Maybe someone should tell him that playing golf will probably not be permitted under their banner.