Holder prepares his "army" of lawyers

By Rolf Yungclas —— Bio and Archives August 25, 2014

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While President Obama has begun to talk tough about ISIS, and on Wednesday said “we will continue to confront this hateful terrorism and replace it with a sense of hope and civility,’ he gave no indication there was any kind of clear strategy that was being developed by his administration. Taking a few minutes to express his outrage at Foley's beheading he headed off to another day of playing golf.

Yet as greater military involvement by America looks inevitable against a terrorist nation that has formed in Iraq and Syria, the next day President Obama had his Attorney General, rather than the Secretary of Defense, to prepare us for the fight:

"This Department of Justice, this Department of Defense, this nation, we have long memories and our reach is very wide. We will not forget what happened and people will be held accountable one way or the other.”

Welcome to Barack Obama's fantasy post-war world, where military action by Americans is supposedly no longer necessary and wars and military actions taken by previous Presidents were all wrong. It looked as if Obama was going to approach a growing threat to American security as he did in response to the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and to captured terrorists, making it a matter of prosecuting individuals in a court of law. Needing to militarily defeat ISIS, the Obama administration instead announced that they were preparing an army of lawyers to prosecute ISIS members for murder and other crimes. And while I don't like the idea of Americans being sent in to battle where they face death and debilitating injuries, just sitting back until a major terrorist act happens on our soil is much worse.

So while the President continued his “working” vacation, Secretary of Defense Hagel and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were discussing what our military strategy needs to be against ISIS without him. Hagel then announced later in the day on Thursday that “we must prepare for everything.” So on Friday we began to see that there was more at work than simply a vigorous prosecution of the individual who decapitated Foley. The rhetoric was clearly heating up as a proxy for the President, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes announced:

"We have seen them posing a threat to our interests in the region, to our personnel and facilities in the region, and clearly the brutal execution of Jim Foley represented an affront, an attack - not just on him, he's an American - and we see that as an attack on our country, when one of our own is killed like that," said. “If you come after Americans, we are going to come after you...we’re not going to be restricted by borders.”

But wait! Over the weekend the President must have caught wind of what his Administration was doing in his absence by his usual advisors, the news media. On Sunday, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey made an about-face, saying that he would not recommend U.S. military airstrikes against ISIS in Syria until he determines that they have become a direct threat to the U.S.” On Thursday, Dempsey had said that ISIS would have to be dealt with on a “non-existent border” between Syria and Iraq. While the President may back down from his non-action action, the move toward war was put on hold by him. At the same time, in an editorial in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, retired four-star general Jack Keane and Danielle Pletka from the American Enterprise Institute, in outlining the need for a U.S.-led coalition against ISIS said:

“Contrary to some claims, this is not a plan for a new American ground war in Iraq seeking to reconstitute a failed state. It is a mission to help Iraqis and Syrians on the ground help themselves. A U.S.-led international coalition can provide the military capability, including air interdiction to deny ISIS freedom of movement, take away its initiative to attack at will in Iraq, and dramatically reduce its sanctuary in Syria."

We’ll see how bad things have to get before the reality of events in the Middle East overtake President Obama’s fantasy world.