When pressed by a nor­mal­ly docile gag­gle of White House reporters recent­ly over whether he would con­sid­er chang­ing his failed Syr­ia strat­e­gy, Pres­i­dent Oba­ma revert­ed to form: he accused Repub­li­cans of reli­gious big­otry and cru­el­ty to children.

His polit­i­cal oppo­nents, he said, believe that “only Chris­tians, proven Chris­tians, should be admit­ted” as refugees and that we “shouldn’t admit 3‑year old-orphans.”

The President’s efforts to divert atten­tion from his for­eign pol­i­cy deba­cles (which helped make orphans and refugees of three-year-olds) have so far fall­en flat.  The vast major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans has lost con­fi­dence in his cam­paign against the Islam­ic State.  A Wash­ing­ton Post poll found that 57 per­cent dis­ap­prove of the way he’s deal­ing with the ter­ror­ist group – includ­ing 46 per­cent who strong­ly dis­ap­prove – against only 35 per­cent who sup­port him.

That pub­lic sen­ti­ment, of lit­tle inter­est to the Pres­i­dent, is a lead­ing con­cern for those vying to suc­ceed him.  Even Bernie Sanders claims to have a plan to destroy the Islam­ic State. Though they dif­fer in cer­tain respects, most of these plans call for drop­ping more bombs against more tar­gets from planes fly­ing the flags of more coun­tries (with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Rus­sia), pro­vid­ing more arms to fac­tions we don’t real­ly know and can’t real­ly trust, and deploy­ing more mil­i­tary “advis­ers” (not to be con­fused with “boots on the ground”) to the region.

All of them sug­gest that Islam­ic State can be van­quished with rel­a­tive ease and at lit­tle cost.  All of them are blow­ing smoke. Con­tin­ue read­ing →