“If I had been President of the United States,” Lindsey Graham told Michael Gallagher this morning, “these people would still be in prison.” By these people, Graham refers to the Taliban 5 traded for Bowe Bergdahl, whom the Army has charged with desertion. Graham argues that the five Taliban commanders “collaborated with al-Qaeda to strike our own nation,” and wonders what kind of signal to the people still under Taliban fire. The issue isn’t Bergdahl, Graham argues, as much as it is the denial inherent in Barack Obama’s assumption that the war is over:

Graham’s trying to convince people that he’s making a serious run at the presidency, and the one area in which Graham can compete in this cycle is national security. Expect him to be a very loud voice on foreign policy and fighting ISIS this year, but he’s not the only Senator ripping the White House for its handling of the dangers of the Middle East. Kelly Ayotte told Fox News Sunday that “there’s a fire alarm ringing” in the region,” not just on a lack of strategy but a lack of leadership:

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, (R-N.H.) is criticizing the Obama administration for what she sees as a lack of a cogent strategy to fight militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), warning that it could hurt American efforts to build a strong coalition.

“There is a fire alarm ringing, Chris,” Ayotte said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I think there is a real concern out there not only about a lack of strategy, but in order to be a leader, to bring everyone together and work together, you have to be able to be counted.”

Earlier in the exchange, Chris Wallace made a similar argument as Graham — that the US was in a war but refused to admit it, and refused to speak plainly about the nature of the enemy as well. Ayotte concurred, saying that political correctness has become a higher priority at the White House than actually defeating ISIS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FTOY9eqKvE

WALLACE: I want to go back, Senator Ayotte, to the big picture and to that map. And the Obama administration’s continued refusal to say that we are in a war with Islamic extremism. Here this week is Secretary of the State John Kerry.

JOHN KERRY, SECRETARY OF STATE: Today, we are witnessing nothing more than a form of criminal anarchy, a nihilism, which illegitimately claims an ideological and religious foundation.

WALLACE: Senator Ayotte, why does it matter what we call our enemies in the region?

AYOTTE: It very much matters because you have to define your enemy. And here is the problem, I think they should spend less time on being worried about being politically correct about how we define our enemies and more time on a strategy to defeat them. One of the things we heard consistently this week from the national security experts, including General Keane, was a lack of a strategy. It was very disjointed what’s happening and what we see is more outgrowth of these extremist groups in the region.

The criticism isn’t just coming from Republicans, either. Jackson Diehl writes at the Washington Post that Democrats have become “deeply skeptical” about Obama’s negotiations with Iran, as well as his handling of the crises in Iraq/Syria and Ukraine:

For more than two years, a breach has been opening between President Obama and the foreign policy establishment of the Democratic Party. Last week, as Russia pressed a new offensive in Ukraine and the Senate debated sanctions on Iran, it cracked open a little wider.

First came the introduction in the Senate, and lopsided passage by the Banking Committee, of a bill that would place new sanctions on Iran if no agreement limits its nuclear program by June. Though fiercely opposed by Obama, the measure, co-sponsored by Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, had won the express support of 13 other Democratic senators by the end of the week. A letter signed by Menendez plus nine of them pledged to delay a final floor vote until March 24, the deadline set by the administration for finalizing the framework of a ­bargain.

While that postponement avoided an immediate confrontation with Obama, the larger message of the senators was clear: They are “deeply skeptical,” said the letter, that Obama will obtain adequate concessions from Tehran — despite what has been an increasingly single-minded diplomatic push. …

The Democratic rebellion against Obama’s policies began with Syria and Obama’s refusal to provide support to rebels battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Obama’s rejection in 2012 of a proposal by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA Director David Petraeus to train and arm the rebels alienated a wide swath of the Democratic foreign policy mainstream — including Levin, who has campaigned for creating a no-fly zone in northern Syria, and Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. Smith called for a formal Pentagon training program for Syrian rebels a year before Obama finally agreed to it.

The dissension now encompasses Ukraine, where Obama is seen as having been too slow and limited in his response to Russia’s gross violation of international treaties guaranteeing European borders, and, even more so, Iran — where a growing number of Democrats worry that Obama is offering too-generous terms while failing to challenge Iran’s conventional aggression in the Middle East, at the expense of Israel and traditional U.S. Arab allies.

Obama got forced into a more assertive policy in Ukraine this weekend, but it’s too little and far too late to stop renewed Russian adventurism. Even NBC is pointing out the straw men Obama constructs to defend his foreign policy. Diehl writes of a no-confidence vote among Obama’s allies on Capitol Hill, produced by a lack of leadership and engagement that even Democrats can no longer deny. The US is getting pushed out of these regions, not because we can’t push back, but because the Obama administration won’t push back.

Update: Twitter follower Gadsden Jazz reminds me that the MoH is not “won.” That is a quote from Graham, though, which is how it ended up in the headline (although to be honest, I didn’t catch the error at the time either). I’ve added the quotes in the headline to note the source.