As Predicted Obama's Failed Iraq Strategy Exposes Inability to Understand Security Issues Let Alone Lead a Successful Effort

And once again, thousands of Iraqis are paying the price for Obama's incompetence with their lives!

This week, Ramadi, a key strategic city in Iraq and one that Americans fought and died to secure fell to ISIS. And while the news media delights in pestering Republican presidential aspirants on whether they would have invaded Iraq none of them have asked Obama why his strategy to defeat ISIS has failed. And yes it has failed. Doyle McManus writing in the L.A. Times tells us why. Obama made a great speech last September promising to shore up the Iraqis and then seems to have forgotten all about the problem.

Aide that was promised was never delivered. A handful of U.S. military trainers had no impact and the pinprick bombing campaign did nothing to stop ISIS from advancing. Last September Marine General James Conway, former Commandant of the Marine Corps correctly predicted that Obama's strategy hasn't got "a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding." He was right.

But Obama and the people around him don't seem to get it. Obama delivered the commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday where he declared that the biggest threat we face is climate change. Columnist Ed Rogers describes the disconnect as a "lack of insight — the denial, delusion and downright, jaw-dropping inability to deal with the world as it is."

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest wasn't any better at showing some sense. In his Tuesday briefing Earnest repeatedly used the word "success" in describing Obama's strategy despite "setbacks." At one point Earnest said "the strategy that the President has laid out has enjoyed periods of progress and success." Yet everywhere you look the problem is worse, not better.

White House: "Light our hair on fire?"

Jordanian Pilot burned alive by ISIS
in February.

Earnest's use of the word "setback" to describe Obama's policy is nothing new. In November last year he also said "there will be days of progress and there are going to be periods of setback." The problem is that the setbacks seem to get worse and the success more distant. On Tuesday Earnest also said "Are we gonna light our hair on fire every time that there is a setback in the campaign against ISIL?" That's an unfortunate choice of words considering the highly public way in which ISIS burned to death a Jordanian Pilot.

It's clear that Obama has no effective strategy to accomplish his stated goal of defeating ISIS. The question is whether he's even trying to do so. Readers may recall the pressure Democrats and the media put on President George W. Bush when the Iraq war was failing. They demanded Bush "listen to the generals" and he did. The surge in Iraq was a success and Obama was able to claim in 2011 that Iraq was "sovereign, stable and self-reliant." It was Obama's failure to negotiate and agreement that left U.S. troops and more importantly, the intelligence networks that led to that success in place that led to to this outcome. Charles Krauthammer drives the point home:

The fact is that by the end of Bush’s tenure the war had been won. You can argue that the price of that victory was too high. Fine. We can debate that until the end of time. But what is not debatable is that it was a victory. Bush bequeathed to Obama a success. By whose measure? By Obama’s. As he told the troops at Fort Bragg on Dec. 14, 2011, “We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.” This was, said the president, a “moment of success.”

Which Obama proceeded to fully squander. With the 2012 election approaching, he chose to liquidate our military presence in Iraq. We didn’t just withdraw our forces. We abandoned, destroyed or turned over our equipment, stores, installations and bases. We surrendered our most valuable strategic assets, such as control of Iraqi airspace, soon to become the indispensable conduit for Iran to supply and sustain the Assad regime in Syria and cement its influence all the way to the Mediterranean. And, most relevant to the fall of Ramadi, we abandoned the vast intelligence network we had so painstakingly constructed in Anbar province, without which our current patchwork operations there are largely blind and correspondingly feeble.

The collapse of Iraq and the spread of ISIS is entirely the result of failed Obama policies. Sadly, Obama is too fixated on climate change and the rewards of green corruption for his friends to notice!