President Canute and Orlando
By Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal
June 13, 2016
In the spring of 2013 Barack
Obama delivered the
defining speech of his presidency on the subject of terrorism. Its premise
was wrong, as was its thesis, as were its predictions and recommendations. We
are now paying the price for this cascade of folly.
“Today, Osama
bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants,” the president
boasted at the National Defense University, in Washington, D.C. “There have
been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more
secure.” The “future of terrorism,” he explained, consisted of “less
capable” al Qaeda affiliates, “localized threats” against Westerners in
faraway places such as Algeria, and homegrown killers like the Boston Marathon
bombers.
All of this suggested that it was
time to call it quits on what Mr. Obama derided as “a boundless ‘global war
on terror.’ ” That meant sharply curtailing drone strikes, completing the
withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and closing Guantanamo prison. It
meant renewing efforts “to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians”
and seeking “transitions to democracy” in Libya and Egypt. And it meant
working with Congress to repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force
(AUMF) against al Qaeda.
“This war, like all wars, must
end,” he said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy
demands.”
In 2010, al Qaeda in
Iraq—Islamic State’s predecessor—was “dead on its feet,” as terrorism
expert Michael Knights told
Congress. World-wide, the U.S. government estimated
al Qaeda’s total strength at no more than 4,000 fighters. That was the
result of George
W. Bush ’s surge in Iraq, of Mr. Obama’s own surge in Afghanistan, and
of the aggressive campaign of drone killings in Pakistan and Yemen.
But then the Obama Doctrine kicked
in. Between 2010 and 2013 the number of jihadists world-wide doubled, to
100,000, while the number of jihadist groups rose by 58%, according to a Rand
Corp. study.
That was before ISIS declared its caliphate.
Today, the U.S. government
estimates that ISIS can count on as many as 25,000 fighters. This is after a
two-year campaign of airstrikes to destroy the group. In Libya alone, U.S.
intelligence recently doubled
its estimate of ISIS fighters, to as many as 6,000. Even “core” al Qaeda
is surging
again in its Afghan and Pakistani heartland, thanks in part to the military
gains the Taliban have made in the face of America’s withdrawal.
Apologists for Mr. Obama will
rejoin that it’s unfair to blame him for trends in terrorism, an argument that
would have more credibility if he hadn’t been so eager to take credit for
those trends only three years ago. The same apologists also claim that the U.S.
cannot possibly cure what ails the Middle East, and that no law-enforcement
agency can stop a lone-wolf terrorist such as Omar Mateen.
But these arguments fail. The rise
of ISIS was a predictable result of Mr. Obama’s abdication in Iraq and
especially Syria—a result Mr. Obama himself foresaw in his 2013 speech. “We
must strengthen the opposition in Syria, while isolating extremist elements,”
he said, “because the end of a tyrant must not give way to the tyranny of
terrorism.” Was the opposition strengthened? Were the extremists isolated?
As for lone wolves, one study
from last year cited 38 cases of “lone wolf” terrorism between 1940 and
2001, another 12 during the eight years of the Bush administration—and more
than 50 since then.
The phenomenon is catching in part
because ISIS is canny at using the internet and social media to attract and
activate recruits. But what ISIS mainly does is give aimless and insignificant
young men what most young men secretly crave—a cause worth dying for. When Mr.
Obama attempts to reassure Americans by suggesting, as he did Monday, that
Mateen was not part of “a larger plot,” he demonstrates once again that he
doesn’t understand the enemy. ISIS, al Qaeda and other jihadist groups are not
criminal conspiracies. They are a religious movement. No coordination is
required for the true believer to put his faith into action.
It would require more humility
than Mr. Obama is capable of mustering to admit that what happened in Orlando is
also a consequence of his decisions—of allowing Iraq and Syria to descend to
chaos; of pretending that we could call off the war on terror because fighting
it didn’t fit a political narrative; of failing to defeat ISIS swiftly and
utterly; of refusing to recognize the religious roots of terror; of treating the
massacre in San Bernardino as an opportunity to lecture Americans about
Islamophobia, and Orlando as another argument for gun control.
This is the president’s record.
His successor will have to do better to avoid future Orlandos. Will she?