From Patrick Buchanan at buchanan.org:
Among the presidential candidates of the Republican Party and their foreign policy leaders on Capitol Hill the cry is almost universal:
Barack Obama has no strategy for winning the war on ISIS.
This criticism, however, sounds strange coming from a party that controls Congress but has yet to devise its own strategy, or even to authorize the use of U.S. military force in Syria.
Congress has punted. And compared to the cacophony from Republican ranks, Barack Obama sounds like Prince Bismarck.
The President’s strategy is to contain, degrade and defeat ISIS. While no one has provided the troops to defeat ISIS, the U.S. is using Kurdish and Yazidi forces, backed by U.S. air power, to degrade it.
And recent months have seen measured success.
The Kurds have run ISIS out of Kobani, captured much of the Turkish-Syrian border, and moved to within 30 miles of Raqqa, the ISIS capital. Yazidis and Kurds last week recaptured Sinjar in Iraq and cut the highway between Mosul and Raqqa.
The terrorist attacks in Paris, the downing of the Russian airliner in Sinai, the ISIS bomb that exploded in the Shiite sector of Beirut, are ISIS’s payback. But they could also be signs that the ISIS caliphate, imperiled in its base, is growing desperate and lashing out.
Yet consider the Republican strategies being advanced.
In Sunday’s Washington Post, Mitt Romney writes:
“We must wage the war to defeat the enemy. … [Obama] must call in the best military minds from the United States and NATO … and finally construct a comprehensive strategy that integrates our effort with the Kurds, Turks, Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians.”
The Kurds excepted, Gov. Romney ignored all the forces that are actually fighting ISIS: Russians, Hezbollah, Iran, Bashar Assad, the Syrian army.
Mitt urges instead an alliance of countries that have done next to nothing to defeat ISIS.
The Turks are instead hitting the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The Saudis are bombing the Houthis in Yemen, not ISIS in Raqqa. The Egyptians are preoccupied with their own homegrown terrorists.
“Now is the time, not merely to contain the Islamic State,” says Mitt, “but to eradicate it once and for all.” But why did he not mention Russia, Iran, Assad and Hezbollah, all of which also wish to eradicate ISIS?
We partnered with Stalin in WWII.
Is Vladimir Putin an untouchable?
To continue reading: Is Putin Our Ally in Syria?
