Terrorism: Obama's La La Land Strategy

President Obama and his administration are waging a clumsy campaign to shift America's focus from the rising threat of terrorism to the perils of climate change.  In speeches, Team Obama has designated climate change as the biggest U.S. security threat. Not ISIS. Not even a nuclear armed Iran.

The climate change foil is just the latest failed attempt to deflect public attention from the burgeoning threat of Islamic terrorism.  But the game plan has backfired.  Polling data shows Americans are more concerned about terrorism and are convinced the administration has no blueprint to combat it.

With Americans demanding action, President Obama reacted last week with a half-baked, vague proposal to authorize the use of military force against the Islamic State (ISIS).  But his overture was peppered with more cautionary language than a prescription drug label.

For instance, he repeated his mantra that Americans oppose another ground war like the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The president reassured the nation he has no stomach for an "enduring offensive." He vowed the authorization would not be open-ended, insisting it be limited to three years.

In fact, the president spent more time telling Americans what he did not intend rather than providing a game plan for defeating the rising menace of Islamic-inspired barbarism.  Moreover, the document was superfluous, since he has already authorized bombing ISIS targets without Congressional approval.

It is a dangerous game he is playing. He preaches "strategic patience" while offering no plan for deterring the Islamic scourge charring the Middle East.  But in the president's mind, the country needs to move on because the U.S. has already won the war on terror.  Many Americans are leery.

Bowing to a growing chorus of skepticism, the president recently dispatched National Security Advisor Susan Rice to the Brookings Institute to outline the administration's terrorism strategy.  Instead of reassuring Americans, the speech left little doubt the president and his team are clueless.

"We can't afford to be buffeted by alarmism and an instantaneous news cycle," Ms. Rice said in an attempt to blame the media.  She called ISIS dangerous, but protested it was not "of the existential nature we confronted in World War II." Her message: the Nazis were a lot worse than ISIS.  

Following Ms. Rice's hollow speech, the White House released its own strategic vision, entitled "Fact Sheet: 2015 National Security Strategy."  The document describes how America will "lead the world toward greater peace and new prosperity."  It is a stunning piece of mindless navel-gazing.

As an example, one key tenant of the Obama strategy reads like this: "We will lead with a long-term perspective, influencing the trajectory of major shifts in the security landscape today in order to secure our national interests in the future."  That sounds like drivel from a beauty pageant contestant.

Taking a cue from Ms. Rice, Obama decided the play the media-blame card, too.  "What's that famous saying about local newscasts, right?  If it bleeds, it leads, right?," the president bristled to a sympathetic reporter. He compared the fight against terrorism to the battle against big city crime.

"It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you've got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris," the president opined.  His characterization of the Paris incident was a callous dismissal of anti-Semitism.

As is his custom, Obama stubbornly refuses to use the Islamic terrorism label.  This was no random shooting at a kosher delicatessen.  Yet the president's media guru Josh Earnest and those misspoken-mouthpieces at the State Department tried to defend Obama's depiction.

In less than 24-hours the public uproar reached a crescendo, prompting Earnest and the State Department propagandists to use social media to reassure everyone that the administration really, really did understand the killings at the deli were the work of Jew-hating terrorists.

It was another bewildering moment in what has become a frequent occurrence in these final years of the Obama presidency.  The commander-in-chief has decided the American people are just too dumb to grasp his nuanced esoteric approach to dealing with terrorism, so he downplays its existence.

The problem for Americans is that Islamic thugs have not gotten the president's memo about their surrender.  ISIS and other terrorist groups are flourishing, increasing their control over wide swathes of the Middle East and flaunting their plan to bring the fight to America.

A piece of paper green-lighting military force will not halt the spread of terrorism.  Neither will a president who considers terrorism a figment of the media's imagination.  Frankly, the biggest threat to American security is not climate change but the American president.