As for the Yazidis, Obama seems more concerned with avoiding the appearance of American involvement than he does with saving innocent people about to be slaughtered. And if his “pinprick” attacks are not enough to defeat ISIS, there is no indication that he will up the ante to save innocent lives, never mind to regain the country that America, under his failed leadership, has lost to internecine warfare and Iranian machinations. “As commander-in-chief,” Obama said Thursday, “I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq. And so even as we support Iraqis as they take the fight to these terrorists, American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq.”

Guiding the administration’s hands-off approach to everything in the Middle East (everything, that is, except the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) is the desire to forge accommodation with — or capitulation to — Iran. That’s why there has never been a serious effort to overthrow Assad, why Kerry attempted to intercede on Hamas’s behalf in the latest Gaza war (over the objections of not just Israel, but our other key regional allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia), and why Obama has been so reluctant to assert American power in Iraq, where Tehran now enjoys supreme influence over the Shiite-dominated government. “The pursuit of that accommodation is the great white whale of Obama’s Middle East strategy, and capturing it is all that matters; everything else is insignificant by comparison,” writes former Bush-administration official Michael Doran in a perceptive essay for Mosaic magazine. “The goal looms so large as to influence every other facet of American policy, even so seemingly unrelated a matter as a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.”