Lupica: Time for strategy from Obama on how to deal with ISIS scourge
This time the dead hostage is a 31-year-old freelance journalist named Steven
Sotloff, murdered by ISIS in front of the world the way James Foley was. This is a different sort of mass murder, in a world that grows more mad and more dangerous with every news cycle, one innocent at a time.
This is a way of using hostages to hold us all hostage. So Foley dies the way he does and Steven Sotloff dies the same way, even after his mother begs the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, for mercy, and humanity, as if you can somehow find mercy and humanity in the worst and darkest corners of hell.
At a moment in this country when we are supposed to feel outrage because nude pictures of actresses and other female celebrities are hacked and distributed on the Internet in a weird and creepy way, here is the sight of Sotloff, the latest to kneel in an orange jumpsuit in front of a masked executioner, the latest to show us the most up-to-date form of terror:
One public execution after another, by Nazis in black masks taunting the President of the United States, and thus taunting us all.
“These are animals trying to intimidate us, and intimidate the world, with one chilling video like this after another,” Rep. Pete King, Republican out of Long Island, was saying late Tuesday afternoon. “We keep getting reminded of the downside of instant worldwide communication in the process. And we have to sit there and watch as these people are given a power that they wouldn’t normally be able to get.”
Then King, once chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said:
“This isn’t a time for partisan politics. It’s not. But it is essential for the President to show real leadership now. He cannot continue to tell us, and tell the enemy at the same time, what he’s NOT going to do, with such a terrible threat to us and to the West."
Of course there are no easy answers here. No one in his right mind is asking — or telling — President Obama to invade Syria, to somehow sacrifice more American lives in that part of the world after all that have been sacrificed because George W. Bush, a war-loving President with a war profiteer as vice president, decided to blow up Saddam Hussein and blow up Iraq in the shadow of Sept. 11.
You continue to hear that no good purpose is served by continuing to prosecute Bush and Cheney for the lies that got us into Iraq and killed and wounded so many American men and women, no good purpose in looking back. Well, why not? How can anyone begin to understand the way Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria have become the kind of farm system for terrorists they’ve become over the last decade without understanding the deadly and calamitous foreign policy decisions of Bush the Son, and an SOB like Dick Cheney?
Pete King talked on Tuesday about the various possibilities for dealing with ISIS, talked about air attacks and special forces on the ground and arming the Kurds and getting our allies around the world involved in a forceful and cohesive strategy. There was no statement from President Obama on Tuesday. The country doesn’t want rhetoric from him, or tough talk to satisfy the bullhorn media. What the country does want, and needs, is a strategy, even though the President admitted the other day that he doesn’t have one yet.
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