The Obama doctrine: Just enough to fail

Cast an eye across the world, and his words are a cruel lie. There are no “common principles of justice and progress” with jihadists, and there never will be. The Man Who Killed Bin Laden will lose Iraq and Afghanistan, and will give exactly zero damns. He knows America is exhausted from 13 years of war. (He’s also been given no small amount of aid and comfort by a growing isolationist wing inside the GOP, but that’s a discussion for another day.) He recognizes that his inertia and disengagement in every international crisis in the past six years has created more problems than he has solved, and that he got away with it. His foreign affairs polling numbers are starting to collide with reality, but Barack Obama quite patently doesn’t care how Iraq ends.

Obama has agreed to send a handful of special operators to reinforce the embassy and Iraqi leadership, and there may be some token intel support, but ISIL is deep inside his OODA loop, and Obama is too indifferent to even imagine the hard work of pushing them back. The bumbling trainwreck that is John Kerry will lumber around Baghdad, lecturing and hectoring our soon-to-be dead former allies. “Joseph of Arabia” Biden’s political Tourette syndrome will cause him to blurt out whatever absurdity is on the tip of his tongue. Expect little else.

I’m not here to give you the sweeping catalog of errors in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past six years, to relitigate the decision to invade Iraq in the first place, or to defend the truly abysmal Maliki government. I’m not here to propose a strategy to defeat ISIL, though a constant rain of Hellfires on Toyota Hilux trucks chock-full of AK-toting dudes in black tracksuits seems like a fine start for the festivities. I am here to remind you that ISIL isn’t just a local problem. It isn’t simply a Sunni-Shia religious war; it’s a preview of failed states to come and of the long descent into a world where American leadership is distant, bitter memory. They will replace problematic, troubled, sometimes terrible governments with well-funded, nihilistic terror states governed by men entirely comfortable with mass graves, beheadings, and suicide bombings.