You always want to take anything John Kerry says with a healthy dose of skepticism. And by a healthy dose, I mean the whole bottle. The man who claims he was sent by Richard Nixon in 1968 on a secret mission to Cambodia (think about it) now claims that we're "on the road" to victory over Al Qaeda's JV team - yeah, the same people who burned a Jordanian pilot alive and released a slickly produced video last week to let the world know about it.
They're also the same people who overran major portions of Syria and Iraq earlier in the year while Kerry and Barack Obama were sitting on their hands and dismissing the seriousness of ISIS as any sort of real threat. And these are the same people that Obama still refuses to even consider committing U.S. ground troops to fight against.
But don't worry! We're doing great for a force that refuses to launch a major offensive:
Kerry told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the U.S.-led coalition was "on the road" to defeating the Islamic extremist group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in Iraq and Syria.
He argued that coalition forces have recaptured 22 percent of the populated areas that ISIS once held in the region “without launching what we would call a major offensive."
Retired Gen. John Allen, the White House special envoy on the Islamic State, told ABC’s “This Week” that the United States has accomplished its goal of devising a “comprehensive plan” and striking a “hard blow.”
“I believe they have actually,” said Allen, pointing to the northern Syria town of Kobani. Kurdish troops took control of the town several days ago after hundreds of coalition airstrikes on ISIS positions.
Now this is defining success down if I've ever heard it. Sure, ISIS still controls 78 percent of the territory they captured earlier in the year while we sat back and did nothing to stop them (helped in large part by Obama's refusal to sign a status of forces agreement with Iraq, meaning there were no U.S. troops left in place to serve as a counterveiling force in the first place). But hey, we've bombed them out of the rest without even really fighting!
That, of course, begs the obvious question: Why aren't we really fighting? And why aren't we at least directly arming the Kurds, who are willing to take the fight to ISIS even if the United States is not?
I think a lot of the reluctance has to do with the fear that a U.S. serviceman (or woman) will get captured in the battle and ISIS will do to them what they did to the Jordanian pilot - or something even worse. And yes, that's a real danger we should not take lightly. That's why you need to have a good strategy before you go in.
But if the United States has now reached the point where we won't fight a worthy battle because we fear what the enemy might do in retaliation, we have really lost our understanding of who we are as a nation. To be sure, this is a different kind of enemy. Even in World War II when we fought Nazi Germany, we were able to have reasonable confidence that the Nazis would adhere to the Geneva Convention in their treatment of prisoners. With ISIS, you can be confident of no such thing. That's a sobering thought.
But it's also exactly why we need to defeat them, because people like this with absolutely no conscience and no moral boundaries simply cannot be permitted to overrun a nation of strategic importance to the United States while America's leaders sit around and refuse to take action. We have the ability to defeat them and right now we're not really fighting because we're afraid of what might happen, or of how the public might respond. So we redefine success as the little we can do without really launching a major offensive.
That is sad. But that's what you get when you elect leaders who scoff at the idea of American leadership. And America, some of us warned you before you did this, and then again before you did it again.
