Is President Obama's Islamic State Strategy Doomed For Failure

President Barack Obama meets with his national security advisors in the Situation Room of the White House, Aug. 7, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Obama's ISIS Strategy: Doomed For Failure -- Robert W. Merry, National Interest

"He remains mired in the same thinking that started with George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has generated growing chaos in the region ever since."



In the spring of 1956, the prominent U.S. columnist Joseph Alsop, who enjoyed wide access to world leaders around the globe, traveled through the Middle East on an extended reporting trip. He got numerous interviews with Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. He visited Saudi Arabia and dined at King Saud’s Jeddah palace. He visited Kuwait, which struck him as “little more than a vast oil well with a small town on top of it.” He fulfilled extensive reporting missions in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel.



After ten weeks, he returned to Washington and produced a series of columns on what he had seen in the region and how it had struck him. “The picture there is ominous,” he wrote. “Unless present trends can somehow be reversed the free world must eventually expect a Middle Eastern disaster on the approximate scale of the disastrous loss of China to the communists.”



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Update: A halfhearted U.S. war effort in the Middle East -- Andrew J. Bacevich, L.A. Times



My Comment: Does anyone support President Obama's Islamic State strategy? I have never seen the U.S. pundit class .... especially from those who comment on U.S. military/foreign affairs .... so universally against a President's war/foreign policy. Personally .... the U.S. should do everything in it's power to refrain from becoming involved in another Middle East war .... but wow .... the pressure on President Obama to escalate the conflict must be intense.