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OBAMA DOES HAVE A STRATEGY: BURY THE BAD NEWS That's been his vision all along. By Thomas Sowell Those people who say that President Obama has no clear vision and no clear strategy for dealing with the ISIS terrorists in the Middle East may be mistaken. It seems to me that he has a very clear and very consistent strategy. And a vision behind that strategy. First the strategy — which is to get each crisis off the front pages and off television news programs as quickly as he can, in whatever way he can, at the lowest political cost....

Barack Obama seems finally on his way to developing some sort of strategy to deal with ISIS. Obama has been criticized by both sides of the aisle for informing ISIS that he had no strategy to deal with them. Most know by now that Obama once labelled ISIS the "JV", then tried to argue he didn't say it. The lie is so egregious that even Politifact hammered Obama for it. Barack Obama is careening from one foreign policy blunder to another. After he was elected Obama believed that his Apologizing for America Tour would solve everything. It didn't. Then he decided...

Last night, Barack Obama promised America that he would take the fight to ISIS/ISIL, using a four-pronged strategy that he laid out in his much-anticipated war speech. In each phase of this strategy, Obama insisted, we would be “joined by a broad coalition of partners,” emphases mine: First, we will conduct a systematic campaign of airstrikes against these terrorists. Working with the Iraqi government, we will expand our efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions, so that we’re hitting ISIL targets as Iraqi forces go on offense. Moreover, I have made it clear that we will hunt...

President Obama told congressional leaders at a White House meeting on Monday he wouldn’t need their authorization to expand his military campaign against Islamic terrorists. The president offered the assurance at a private White House meeting one day before a primetime address he’s scheduled to give to the nation. Wednesday’s address is a pivotal moment for the president just months before a midterm election in which the Senate’s majority hangs in the balance. Polls show that confidence in Obama’s foreign policy is eroding just as anxiety over the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has...

Wary of putting combat troops in Iraq, the U.S. government is gauging contractors’ interest in advising the Iraqi Defense Ministry and Counter Terrorism Service in a range of capacities, including force development, logistics and planning and operations. The U.S. Army Contracting Command posted a notice last month seeking contractors willing to work on an initial 12-month contract, who should be “cognizant of the goals of reducing tensions between Arabs and Kurds, and Sunni and Shias.” They would focus on administration, force development, procurement and acquisition, contracting, training management, public affairs, logistics, personnel management, professional development, communications, planning and operations, infrastructure...

If you're wondering why America's political leaders seem so hesitant to devise a response to the frightening rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, let me tell you a story. It's about the neocons and liberal hawks who cried wolf. Once upon a time, some foreign-policy hands warned that unless the United States invaded Iraq, Islamic radicals — the kind who murdered thousands of Americans on 9/11 — would obtain weapons of mass destruction. During the hunt for Osama bin Laden, they warned against losing sight of the danger of a possibly nuclear-armed Iraq. "[T]he larger campaign must...

Arab States Skeptical of U.S. Plan to Combat Islamic State Militants Obama Seeks to Galvanize Middle East Coalition to Fight Extremists By JAY SOLOMON Sept. 7, 2014 WASHINGTON—A chief element of President Barack Obama's plans to combat Islamic State militants is to line up a coalition of Arab nations to help. Arab officials, so far, have been lukewarm about the idea. Governments across the region are pressing the Obama administration to make clear what military, financial and diplomatic measures it is preparing to take against Islamic State before they sign on to any U.S.-led coalition, said...

White House reportedly planning years-long campaign to destroy ISIS Published September 08, 2014 ·FoxNews.com The Obama administration is reportedly preparing a campaign to destroy the Islamic State militant group that could outlast the president's remaining time in office, according to a published report. The New York Times, citing U.S. officials, reported late Sunday that the White House plan involves three phases that some Pentagon officials believe will require at least three years of sustained effort. The first phase, airstrikes against Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is already underway in Iraq, where U.S. aircraft have launched 143 attacks since August...

President Obama was being needlessly modest when he told reporters he had no strategy for dealing with the Islamic State. Not true. He does, in fact, have a strategy; it's just been buried under a pile of bloated, JV-league cliches. After carefully reviewing his many statements on the topic over the past months, we've managed to piece the president's line of reasoning together into a more or less coherent statement. To wit...

In parts of Helmand province, the UK and the US lost more soldiers in the long Afghan war than any other Afghan area. Helmand – where the fighting was long and hard. Helmand – where so many lost limbs or were otherwise terribly mutilated in a long and now lost war by a Nato now thoroughly preoccupied with matters elsewhere. But 6 September the New York Times published an important report with the story Kabuli officials want to cover up and nobody anywhere near Nato would want to tell. They are saying more than 200 police officers and Afghan soldiers...

Those people who say that President Obama has no clear vision and no clear strategy for dealing with the ISIS terrorists in the Middle East may be mistaken. It seems to me that he has a very clear and very consistent strategy. And a vision behind that strategy. First the strategy — which is to get each crisis off the front pages and off television news programs as quickly as he can, in whatever way he can, at the lowest political cost. Calling ISIS a junior varsity months ago accomplished that goal. Saying before the 2012 elections that "bin Laden...

One day before the thirteenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, President Barack Obama plans to address the nation on the threat posed by ISIS extremists -- telling NBC News the U.S. will “hunt down" the terrorists "wherever they are.” The president revealed his plans for the upcoming address during a wide-ranging, exclusive interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. “What I'm going to be asking the American people to understand is, number one, this is a serious threat,” Obama said about the speech, which is not expected to be a prime time address. “Number two, we have the capacity to...

A video, entitled “A Second Message to America,” was released on September 2nd purporting to show the beheading of American journalist Steven Sotloff by an ISIS jihadist. The Obama administration could not immediately verify the authenticity of the video. Meanwhile, as strange as it may seem, ISIS itself decried the early release of the video “before the official time,” but did not deny responsibility for the barbaric act. Apparently, ISIS not only combines its medieval barbarism with 21st century social media technology, but also wants to time the marketing of its barbarism for maximum prime time effect. Mr. Sotloff was...

The word of the day is “deliberate.” On Thursday morning, White House Deputy National Security Advisor Tony Blinken said that the Obama administration is seeking to combat the Islamic State threat, as it executes one “terrorist attack” after another against the United States, in a “deliberate” fashion. That’s a far more generous way of confessing to near paralytic dithering. Last week, President Barack Obama admitted that his administration does not “have a strategy yet” for attacking the Islamic State in its Syrian stronghold. On Wednesday, noting in the same speech that his administration would seek to “destroy” ISIS and/or “shrink”...

SEPTEMBER 1, 2014 Obama, Outed: If Only If he’s bored, we’d be more than happy to let him leave. By Quin Hillyer Just resign already. Go. Be gone. Vamoose. Get out of our lives. More important: Stop endangering all of us with your self-indulgent vacations and self-absorbed dithering, along with unconstitutional domestic power plays while the whole world burns. Barack Obama already is derelict in his duties as commander in chief. He ought to abdicate and just step off his self-made throne. Knowledgeable people were calling for Obama to begin air strikes against the Islamic State barbarians months before Obama...

War On Terror: Reports that Barack Obama received detailed information on the virulent Islamic State terror group in his daily briefings for over a year and did nothing makes him officially our "being there" president. Leading from behind once again, as he flew to Estonia to draw a red line that Russia shouldn't cross after it finishes gobbling up Ukraine, President Obama told reporters, "We will not be intimidated" by the second beheading of an American journalist and warned that we would "degrade and destroy" the Islamic State. Degrade? Degrading has been the foreign policy of a president who recently...

President Barack Obama said Sunday it's time for the U.S. to "start going on some offense" against the group calling itself the Islamic State (also ISIS or ISIL), saying he would make an address to the nation Wednesday about his "game plan" going forward. "On Wednesday, I'll make a speech and describe what our game plan's going to be going forward," Obama said Sunday during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I'm preparing the country to make sure that we deal with a threat from ISIL." Continuing his amped-up rhetoric of the past few days, Obama said the goal...

President Obama said he plans to address the nation on the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on Wednesday, vowing to "hunt down" the terrorists. Obama said in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" that the U.S. will track down ISIS "wherever they are." “What I'm going to be asking the American people to understand is, number one, this is a serious threat,” Obama said about the Wednesday speech. “Number two, we have the capacity to deal with it.” “This is not the equivalent of the Iraq war,” Obama says, emphasizing he won’t advocate...

I had a bad Labor Day holiday, but my troubles don't matter much. President Obama's was decidedly worse, and unfortunately his matter a lot. The crucial thing, though, is that I know I had a bad couple of days. It is not clear to me that President Obama realizes that he did, and that should trouble all of us. First, my tale of minor woes. I was in Washington for the Annual American Political Science Association meeting. Several thousand political science professors in the same hotel may sound like a lot of fun (or maybe it doesn't) but it usually...

One year. Yet still President No Strategy is flummoxed. So flummoxed that he simply flees to the fairway. It gets worse: