Mother Jones
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Today the Wall Street Journal editorial page sings the praises of French President François Hollande:
French security forces Wednesday conducted hundreds of antiterror raids and placed more than 100 suspects under house arrest….Security forces found a weapons cache in the city of Lyon that included Kalashnikov rifles and a rocket launcher….France has some 11,500 names on government watch lists. Many are likely to be detained under the three-month state of emergency that Mr. Hollande declared after Friday’s attacks.
….Mr. Hollande has been right to declare war on Islamic State and order French bombing raids on its capital in eastern Syria. France is still a militarily capable nation, as it proved when it turned back an al Qaeda offensive in Mali in 2013. It can do significant damage to ISIS if it increases the tempo of its current bombing or deploys its Foreign Legion to liberate the city of Raqqa.
….Until America gets a new Commander in Chief, Mr. Hollande is the best antiterror leader the West has.
Hmmm. It’s certainly true that Hollande has been among the most hawkish of European leaders. It’s also true that France was one of the first to join the US air campaign against ISIS—though their military efforts so far have been little more than pinpricks. But let’s roll the tape back to June 2014, when President Obama was first trying to put together a coalition. He and Hollande issued a joint communique with all the right promises, but as France 24 reported, “Behind that facade of unity, there are significant disagreements between the two countries about how best to respond to the recent bloody territorial surge by ISIS.”
Why France is reluctant to act against ISIS in Iraq
On June 18, a meeting was held in the Elysee with the French Ministers of Defence and Foreign Affairs….For the moment, however, no military measures are planned….Moreover, “No one has asked for it”, added the same source. Requests for military assistance from Baghdad have so far been addressed to the international community or Washington, but “not specifically to France”, as a foreign affairs spokesman pointed out on June 17.
….The lack of French enthusiasm for an armed intervention in Iraq, whether it be air strikes or sending military advisers to Baghdad, is due partly to fear that any intervention would be ineffective if it were not accompanied by a real commitment by the Iraqi government to act on sectarian tensions.
That’s the best anti-terror leader the West has, according to the Journal. Nobody had “specifically” asked France, so Hollande decided to hang tight and see which way the wind was blowing.
This is the kind of thing that makes it so hard to talk about ISIS and terrorism. It’s not as if this has been Obama’s finest hour, after all, and it would be silly to suggest otherwise. But the opposition has generally been much worse. Obama waffled over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, but then Congress bungled things further by refusing to approve Obama’s call for retaliatory strikes—with both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio joining in. Obama may have been late to recognize the threat from ISIS, but he’s still the guy who put together the coalition. France has been a good partner in the fight against ISIS, but that happened only after Obama spent some time cajoling them into action.
And Republicans simply can’t be bothered to take any of this seriously. They blather about Obama being weak, but when you ask them for their plans you just get nonsense. They demand “leadership”; they bask in cheap applause lines about a bigger military; they all chime in like puppets to agree on a no-fly zone; they suggest we stop worrying about civilian casualties; they propose more arms for the Kurds; they want to team up with Sunni tribal leaders without saying how they’d accomplish it; and they vaguely imply that we should bomb ISIS differently….or more….or with greater determination….or something.
None of this is remotely serious. A bigger military wouldn’t affect ISIS. A no-fly zone wouldn’t affect ISIS. Killing civilians would actively help ISIS. The Kurds aren’t going to fight ISIS in Sunni territory. Sunni leaders aren’t going to be reliable allies until they trust Baghdad to treat them equitably. And sure, we could bomb more, but there’s not much point until we have the ground troops to back it up. But Republicans have been unanimously opposed to American troops all along, and Iraqi ground troops flatly aren’t yet willing or able to do the job.
I hardly want to be in the position of pretending that Obama’s ISIS strategy has been golden. But Republicans make him look like Alexander the Great. They treat the whole subject like a plaything, a useful cudgel during a presidential campaign. Refugees! Kurds! Radical Islam! We need to be tougher!
That isn’t leadership. It barely even counts as coherent thought. It’s just playground jeering. But right now, that’s all we’re getting from them.
Continued here:
When Will Republicans at Last Get Serious About National Security?
