Better in their words…

Hillary thinks its important; some think being on ISIS ‘hate em’ list is something to be proud of.
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To Spite ISIS
The post-9/11 cliché “the terrorists will have won” now has a successor: “what ISIS wants.” President Obama himself employed a variation of the new slogan in his speech after the San Bernardino attack: “We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That’s what groups like ISIL want.” (We guess ISIS wants Obama to call them ISIS and everyone else to call them ISIL.)

Then there was this much-discussed remark from inevitable presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during a little-watched Democratic debate 1½ weeks ago:

He is becoming ISIS’ best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists. So I want to explain why this is not in America’s interest to react with this kind of fear and respond to this sort of bigotry.

It’s not clear what she imagined Trump was saying in these videos, but it is clear she imagined the videos, as the Blaze reported on debate night. But Mrs. Clinton’s fabrication obscures the real, albeit rhetorical, question—to wit, who cares what ISIS wants, thinks or says?

To be fair to Mrs. Clinton, it’s possible she got confused and mistook Trump for another baby boomer politician who has appeared in an ISIS video. As the Daily Beast reported last month: “A new English-language video put out by ISIS calls Bill Clinton a ‘fornicator’ and George W. Bush a ‘liar.’ ”

Our purpose here is not to cast aspersions on President Clinton (or Bush), merely to underscore the silliness of Mrs. Clinton’s attack on Trump. If he were in an ISIS video, would that be to his discredit? Well, does knowing Mr. Clinton was in such a video change your opinion of him? Should it change anyone’s?

If anything, you’d think being cited in an ISIS video would be a point of pride. It is to Rick Santorum: “The only person that’s been listed in ISIS’ magazine as an enemy of ISIS is me,” BuzzFeed quotes Santorum as telling Breitbart radio.

Mrs. Clinton’s Trump tall tale also raises a question about her own view of ISIS. In a speech last month at the Council on Foreign Relations, she said: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” If that is true, why would ISIS be so concerned about insults against “Islam and Muslims”? Trump has also insulted Seventh-day Adventists, but no one worries about what ISIS thinks of that.

Unlike Mrs. Clinton’s claim, Obama’s assertion that a ground war in the Middle East is what ISIS wants does have a grain of truth. In a March Atlantic article titled “What ISIS Really Wants,” Graeme Wood reported:

The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet [Muhammad] reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam. . . .

Who “Rome” is, now that the pope has no army, remains a matter of debate. But [Australian jihadist Musa] Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the Eastern Roman empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul. We should think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic that ended the last self-identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other Islamic State sources suggest that Rome might mean any infidel army, and the Americans will do nicely.

But Obama’s next words contradict Wood’s account: “They know they can’t defeat us on the battlefield,” the president said. According to Wood, they believe they can defeat us (or “Rome,” whoever that may be). Obama’s view would lead to the conclusion that in spoiling for a war, ISIS is making a grave strategic error. In that case, why not give ISIS what it wants—and, to paraphrase Mencken, give it to them good and hard?

Here’s Obama’s answer:

ISIL fighters were part of the insurgency that we faced in Iraq. But they also know that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops, draining our resources, and using our presence to draw new recruits.

So Obama starts with what may well be a genuine insight about ISIS’ strategic aims. But rather than use it to inform a new American strategy, he retreats into his own ideological comfort zone.

It gets worse. As it turns out, his ruling out of “a long and costly ground war in Iraq and Syria” is less than categorical. This is from a (secondhand) New York Times report of an off-the-record presidential briefing to columnists two weeks ago:

Mr. Obama said that if he did send troops to Syria, as some Republicans have urged, he feared a slippery slope that would eventually require similar deployments to other terrorist strongholds like Libya and Yemen, effectively putting him in charge of governing much of the region. He told the columnists that he envisioned sending significant ground forces to the Middle East only in the case of a catastrophic terrorist attack that disrupted the normal functioning of the United States.

As the Washington Post reported, that Times story had originally included the following passage:

In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments.

“Just as the quote was beginning to make the rounds, it disappeared entirely from the the [sic] Times piece, without a correction or any indication that the piece had been updated,” notes Mediaite’s Alex Griswold.

“There’s nothing unusual here,” the Times later said in a statement. “That paragraph, near the bottom of the story, was trimmed for space in the print paper by a copy editor in New York late last night. But it was in our story on the web all day and read by many thousands of readers. Web stories without length constraints are routinely edited for print.” (We’d received an email to the same effect from Peter Baker, one of the reporters on the story, after we noted the deletion on Twitter.)

But as Griswold noted in a follow-up, the revisions included an addition as well as the deletion, leaving the final product longer than the original. “When forced to make an edit to a piece for publication, they managed to remove the single-most interesting factoid in the piece?” he asks rhetorically. “At the very least, someone showed remarkably poor editorial judgment.”

True, though we’d argue the former quoted passage is even more “interesting”—quite a euphemism!—than the latter. If the president is correct that America’s “sending significant ground forces to the Middle East” is what ISIS wants, then his stated willingness to do so only in the event of “a catastrophic terrorist attack” amounts to an invitation for such an attack.

Given the president’s—and his preferred successor’s—strategic incoherence and detachment from reality, it’s little wonder that a new CNN poll finds “Americans are more likely to say that terrorists are winning the war against the United States than they have been at any point since the September 11 attacks.” That may be just what ISIS wants.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/to-spite-isis-1451499825