Columnist Charles Krauthammer said that President Obama’s ISIS strategy is “to keep the status quo…and hand it off to his successor” on Thursday’s “O’Reilly Factor” on the Fox News Channel.
“This is an unserious campaign. I think Obama’s strategy is simply to hold things in place. He’s looking to keep the status quo. He’s looking for what’s called containment rather than rollback, as he is, for example, with the Iranian nuclear program, and hand it off to his successor. He’s not interested in this. He’s interested in Net Neutrality. He’s interested in immigration reform. He’s interested in all kinds of stuff. His legacies for him in his mind are all at home. So, why is he going to waste his energy on a war that he thinks he’s not going to win anyway, and he’ll hand over to his successor?”
He concluded, “no country is going to join in a coalition led by a country — a leader by the — the leader Barack Obama whose heart isn’t in it. Why would you join a — the reason that we got all the people to join us in the Gulf War in 1991 because everybody knew that Bush, the elder Bush, was going. He said ‘we’re going to do it on our own if we have to, we are going to win,’ and everybody wanted to be on the winning side. That’s how you get a coalition.”
Earlier, Krauthammer talked policy and recommended “what Reagan did in the 80s, he took after some of the Soviet proxies, but not with direct American troops. He did it by proxies, Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan. Succeeded in all three. If there are people on the ground, you supply them with weapons. The one thing that’s entirely incomprehensible in what’s going on right now with ISIS is why are the Kurds not being supplied directly by us? We should be running an airlift, a Berlin Airlift.” He added, “you don’t allow the Turks, who are not lifting a finger, to restrain us. The Kurds are the best. They are courageous. They are skilled, and they have a stake in the game. So, that’s number one, you have to arm them. They have absolutely obsolete equipment.”
Krauthammer continued, “what’s number two is you need a serious air campaign. The number of sorties we are now engaged in is about 50 a day. In Kosovo we were averaging 500 a day, and the stakes for us in Kosovo and the Balkans was infinitely less today than it is today in Iraq and in Syria. We should be running a campaign where nobody in ISIS lifts his head out of a foxhole without expecting it to be blown off.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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