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Slate's Fred Kaplan: Obama Offers Honest Words About Hard Truths
The president doesn’t have any magic solutions for defeating ISIS. And neither does anyone else.
By Fred Kaplan
The question, after President Obama’s prime-time televised speech Sunday night, is whether common sense and an awareness of limits still have a place in American politics.
He has delivered similar speeches before, though this one was more forceful in tone and more specific in language, laying out the elements of what to do, and not do, in a bullet format. (First … Second … Third …) His critics had failed to voice any substantive alternatives to his previous proposals. When a moderator would ask what the critics would do differently, they had no answer, except for some who thought that repeating the words “radical Islam” while dropping smart bombs would somehow make the war go faster.
Obama listed the things that he and other world leaders have done, and stepped up doing since the attacks in Paris. At home, law enforcement and intelligence have thwarted countless plots. Abroad, the military has mounted airstrikes, trained and equipped Syrians and Iraqis fighting ISIS on the ground, sent special-operations forces to accelerate those efforts, and surged intelligence-sharing, while diplomats are trying to negotiate a political cease-fire in Syria, so that the “coalition” of countries—including Russia, he intriguingly noted—can pursue their common interest of defeating ISIS. (The White House also put out a fact sheet, cataloguing these activities in somewhat greater detail.)
He proposed a few things Congress could do: pass a law forbidding anyone on a terrorist watch list from buying semi-automatic weapons (the fact that Senate Republicans voted down such a bill is staggering); step up screenings for those who come to the United States (that should be popular); and pass a bill authorizing the president to use military force against ISIS (congressional Republicans’ persistent refusal to do so reflects an unwillingness to share any responsibility for the war that they keep pushing Obama to wage more fiercely).
more...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2015/12/president_obama_sunday_night_speech_offered_an_honest_assessment_of_how.html
By Fred Kaplan
The question, after President Obama’s prime-time televised speech Sunday night, is whether common sense and an awareness of limits still have a place in American politics.
He has delivered similar speeches before, though this one was more forceful in tone and more specific in language, laying out the elements of what to do, and not do, in a bullet format. (First … Second … Third …) His critics had failed to voice any substantive alternatives to his previous proposals. When a moderator would ask what the critics would do differently, they had no answer, except for some who thought that repeating the words “radical Islam” while dropping smart bombs would somehow make the war go faster.
Obama listed the things that he and other world leaders have done, and stepped up doing since the attacks in Paris. At home, law enforcement and intelligence have thwarted countless plots. Abroad, the military has mounted airstrikes, trained and equipped Syrians and Iraqis fighting ISIS on the ground, sent special-operations forces to accelerate those efforts, and surged intelligence-sharing, while diplomats are trying to negotiate a political cease-fire in Syria, so that the “coalition” of countries—including Russia, he intriguingly noted—can pursue their common interest of defeating ISIS. (The White House also put out a fact sheet, cataloguing these activities in somewhat greater detail.)
He proposed a few things Congress could do: pass a law forbidding anyone on a terrorist watch list from buying semi-automatic weapons (the fact that Senate Republicans voted down such a bill is staggering); step up screenings for those who come to the United States (that should be popular); and pass a bill authorizing the president to use military force against ISIS (congressional Republicans’ persistent refusal to do so reflects an unwillingness to share any responsibility for the war that they keep pushing Obama to wage more fiercely).
more...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2015/12/president_obama_sunday_night_speech_offered_an_honest_assessment_of_how.html
