Barack Obama the JV President

“From what we have learned so far, most of the terrorists involved in last week’s Paris attack were individuals who already resided in France and Belgium”. “There are going to be a few strategies we find that do work, and there are going to be a few strategies that don’t work, and when we find those strategies that do work, we will double down on those”.

“U.S. public diplomacy and global broadcasting have lost their focus on the case for Western values and ideals and effectively countering our opponents’ propaganda and disinformation”, Kasich said. In the absence of reliable and effective local military allies, carving out such refuges would require USA troops.

Meaning, I don’t believe we can afford that.

Republican presidential candidates also oppose Obama.

America’s attack on the trucks followers a French raid yesterday on two ISIS targets in the Islamic State’s de facto capital, Raqqa, Syria.

Anyway, President Obama almost four years later, after rejecting suggestions by USA admirals and generals of how to stabilize post-war Iraq, is now trying to figure out how to stabilize post-war Iraq. But just like Al-Qaeda, even if you cut the serpent off at the head, another one grows back.

Pursuing “limited” military means “tends to be the worst of the military options, because where it leads us is mission creep”. “Right now, we have none”.

While the move appears to be mostly political in nature (the U.S. Constitution explicitly delegates issues of immigration to the federal government), the move could have unsafe and unintended consequences for the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing persecution all over the globe each year. This dynamic partly comes out of the tendency to look at any problem overseas as not only a US problem but also a problem the United States ought to be able to solve, and thus a black mark on whoever happens to be USA president. The threat was mainly confined to aid workers in Iraq and Syria and at the most the danger of “lone wolf” attacks. “That doesn’t seem so tough to me”, the President said in Manila on the sidelines of an Asian regional summit. However, it is imperative to do so in order to protect the security of the United States and Europe.

“If another window opens, I think the United States needs to walk through it”, Duerr said. The Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has repeatedly warned that it is coming after us.

The landscape changed Friday night. The ISIS still controls large segments of territory in Iraq and Syria with many civilians and minorities still trapped.

Critics should offer viable alternatives.

“You can not export democracy”, she said.

If you’ve ever watched toddlers play “Hide and Go Seek”, they cover their eyes, because they think they are invisible. Asked again and again whether he underestimated the threat from Islamic State, a group he once dismissed as a “JV team”, the president said, in effect, “no”.

“There is no compelling reason to believe that anything we are doing will be sufficient”, Republican Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared on Tuesday in a speech in which he proposed intervention by a European and Arab ground force backed by 10,000 USA military advisers and trainers. Ben Carson called for “boots on the ground”, while Donald Trump swore he’d “bomb the s- out of” ISIS-controlled oil fields and hand them over to ExxonMobil. “It’s not who we are”, quoth Obama.

“The president got after me indirectly on this yesterday, saying somehow it was wrong to say what I just said and not have the same sympathies for Muslims”, Bush, aware of the president’s criticism, told the audience, “Well I do, we all have sympathies for people that have been uprooted”.

Mark Ensalaco, University of Dayton director of human rights research, noted that the complexity of the situation is hard to address.

At the end of the 84th legislative session in May 2015, Texas lawmakers approved more than $88 million in funding for the state’s Refugee Assistance Program during the 2016-2017 biennium, more than $18 million more than was allocated for the previous biennium in 2013.

In measuring progress in the American-led air war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, numbers tell one story but results tell another. It is understandable that Americans would be wary of conflict after ten years of seemingly unending war in the Middle East.