President Barack Obama warns against getting too alarmed over terrorism. He says it’s just one of several big threats, with climate change being another. That’s headlined as news, and stirs up his critics. Yet no one should have been surprised by his circumspection about Islamist terror, he’s made no secret of where he stands.
OPINION
In the very first debate in the 2008 Democratic presidential race, the candidates were asked what they would do if two American cities were again hit by terrorists who were “beyond the shadow of a doubt” al-Qaida.
Obama talked about ensuring there was an effective emergency response, then making sure “we’ve got good intelligence . . . so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.” Then he added, “But what we can’t do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast.”
That answer didn’t sound so good when Hillary Clinton responded, “I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate.”
Obama aspired to be president to reengineer health care, spread the wealth around, transform America domestically — not to wage war against Islamist terrorism. That’s a term he refuses to use despite the plain-in-your-face evidence of it being the source of most of the world’s terror atrocities.
He campaigned on Iraq being the wrong war and Afghanistan being the good one. Once in the White House he had to act on that. He ordered a 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan. Former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates revealed in his memoir “Duty” that it soon became apparent that Obama “doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
Ever enamored of the sound of his own words, the president sometimes talks tough. He laid down a red line promising military strikes if Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people in his country’s civil war. When Assad did that, Obama retreated from his threat.
He declared that Iran must not get a nuclear weapon, but now negotiates to limit the breakout time for Tehran to go nuclear to a year.
Further evidence of Obama as a reluctant commander-in-chief came Wednesday in the proposal for an authorization to use military force against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria that he presented to Congress.
Obama is a president who ignores the Constitution and undermines Congress to advance his domestic agenda on issues like health care and immigration. But when it comes to making war, he invites Congress to hem in the authority of the commander in chief by limiting his discretion to use ground forces as events may dictate. The language in his resolution against “enduring offensive ground combat operations” is no doubt aimed at the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party.
Republicans, who believe a president shouldn’t be undercut or micromanaged in waging war, have majorities in both houses. Surely there are enough Democrats who trust their president’s judgment to combine with Republicans to give Obama a broad resolution to fight the ISIS threat — if he wanted one. But you get the sense that Obama doesn’t desire that kind of authority. He’d like to be restricted, restrained and limited in making war, confined to taking action in accordance with his cautions against alarmism.
What’s more, his proposed war resolution comes against the backdrop of the widely held conviction that Obama doesn’t have a strategy to combat the global terrorist menace. That’s yet another sign of a reluctant commander in chief.
The country’s predicament in the age of Islamist terrorism was aptly summed up by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who will support Obama’s authorization request, to the New York Times: “You go to war with the president you’ve got, which would give us all pause.”
