Hume: Obama Not Fighting ISIS for ‘Safety and Security’ of US, but for ‘Political Reasons’

On Tuesday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File,” network senior political analyst Brit Hume criticized the United States’ effort to fight ISIS.

Hume argued there has to be a degree of commitment to defeat ISIS, which isn’t coming from President Barack Obama and his administration. He attributed that to how Obama viewed ISIS, which isn’t as a threat to the United States, but more a threat to the region.

Partial transcript as follows:

Well, we’re certainly not winning, and if you’re engaged in a long war, as Winston Churchill’s experience illustrates, you can go a long time before you start to win. The question is, does this president have the kind of commitment that the leaders in World War II had, which is based upon the premise, this is a war that had to be won. This was an enemy that had to be defeated, because the survival of our civilization as we know it was at stake. I don’t think this president has that view of the world as he sees it today. Certainly not in the Middle East. I think he thinks that what ISIS is up to in the Middle East is basically a regional threat.

And he’s doing what he’s doing in a sort of limited way, because he thinks he has to for political reasons, but I don’t think he’s doing it because he thinks that ISIS must be defeated for the safety and security of the United States. I don’t think he believes that, I don’t think he believes what Vladimir Putin has been up to in the Ukraine and perhaps elsewhere, is a direct threat to the United States. And I think that he feels that yes we need to do something to answer China’s moves in that part of the world, but nothing that urgent. And so, his heart is not in doing these things. And the result is, we are fighting a kind of a halfhearted tentative war in the Middle East and elsewhere.

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