Free Republic

Nearly six years into a presidency devoted to ending wars, President Obama on Wednesday announced he is launching a new global war against the ultra-violent al Qaeda terror group known as the Islamic State. The president’s new strategy of conducting U.S. airstrikes combined with foreign military ground operations against IS in Iraq and Syria, however, will be limited to the terror group, and lacks what analysts say is a broader ideological offensive against Islamist terror of all stripes.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson said. A few centuries later his fellow Englishman, Winston Churchill, quipped, “The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.” It’s not true of the United States, but it is true of Barack Obama who, having exhausted every alternative that involved appeasement or pretending that ISIS wasn’t a threat, has decided to do the right thing. As long as he gets enough applause for doing it. With his approval ratings, particularly on American leadership and national security, lower than Assad’s, he decided to exploit September...

As President Obama laid out his “strategy” last night for dealing with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and as bipartisan leadership in Congress push to approve as much as $4 billion to arm the Syrian “rebels,” it should be noted that the keystone to his anti-Assad policy — the “vetted moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) — is now admitting that they, too, are working with the Islamic State.This confirms our reporting about the FSA’s alliances with Syrian terrorist groups here at PJ Media last week.On Monday, the Daily Star in Lebanon quoted a FSA brigade commander saying that his...

The Kingdom of Jordan is deeply concerned about the Obama administration’s renewed plan to train “moderate” rebels in Syria, believing the Syrian rebels are mostly extremists who espouse radical al-Qaida-like ideology, a senior Jordanian security official told WND.

Light arms supplied by the United States are flowing to "moderate" Syrian rebel factions in the south of the country and U.S. funding for months of further deliveries has been approved by Congress, according U.S. and European security officials. The weapons, most of which are moving to non-Islamist Syrian rebels via Jordan, include a variety of small arms, as well as some more powerful weapons, such as anti-tank rockets. The deliveries do not include weapons such as shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, known as MANPADs, which could shoot down military or civilian aircraft, the officials said. (Snip)