Double-reverse psychology: ISIS leader taunts U.S. for not sending troops

It sounds like a taunt, and I suppose it is, but there are taunts born of sheer bravado - and then there are taunts with purpose from people who sound like they well understand the psychology of their enemy. That assumes, of course, that Barack Obama is really an enemy of ISIS. His actions certainly don't suggest that he sees it that way. But to the extent Obama commands the one force most capable of defeating ISIS should it ever receive orders to try, ISIS at least has to make sure Obama feels no particular incentive to do so.

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And how better to do that than to feed Obama's narrative that a major U.S. commitment to the battle is "just what the terrorists want." It matters not at all that U.S. ground troops coming at them is the last thing ISIS could conceivably want because it would spell swift and sure defeat. As long as Obama can justify his statement that ISIS wants to draw the U.S. into a war, he'll have all the political cover he thinks he needs to continue doing nothing. So ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gave Obama exactly the talking points he needs:

In the 24-minute audio, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi said the U.S. won’t come to fight the extremists because “their hearts are full of fear from the mujahideen.” The message was al-Baghdadi’s first since May, and comes amid battlefield setbacks that ISIS has recently faced. "America and its allies dream of destroying the caliphate through their proxies and henchmen, and whenever an alliance of theirs fails or a tail is cut, they hasten to establish another, until they recently declared the Salouli (Saudi) alliance that was falsely called Islamic," al-Baghdadi added. Islamic State has been facing heavy pressure from the Saudi-led Islamic military coalition against terrorism in the Middle East along with a ground offensive from U.S.-backed Syrian rebels. The rebels captured a major dam on the Euphrates River from ISIS as part of the coalition’s march on ISIS-held areas in northern Syria and Iraqi forces are on the brink of drawing the militants out of Ramadi, according to The Wall Street Journal.

You all know the kind of guy Obama is. Certainly not the type to want to make a guy like this eat his words. Quite the contrary, he's the type of guy who will say, This is exactly what I've been telling you. Drawing the U.S. into a long, costly, bloody ground war is exactly what ISIL wants. And I'm not the kind of president who's going to be taunted into some macho ****-waving contest. This reverse psychology isn't going to work on me! Except that I think this is really double-reverse psychology. Al-Baghdadi knows exactly how Obama wants to react, so he makes it easy for him to do so by appealing to Obama's false sense of intellectual superiority. Obama can now say he was too smart to let al-Baghdadi manipulated him, which in fact he is being completely manipulated into doing the very thing for which al-Baghdadi just called him a coward. By the way, I don't agree that Obama is a coward. Obama will fight an enemy he thinks is really a problem. It's just that ISIS doesn't fall into that category.