In his latest try to appear to have a strategy for combating the rise of a radical Islamist empire in Syria and Iraq, President Obama has asked Congress for $ 500 million to fund “appropriately vetted” Syrian opposition groups.
He’s asking years after the money had a place to go. The secular rebels who pleaded with Obama for meaningful support have long since been violently crushed between the regime of President Bashar Assad and the jihadists of ISIS.
Still worse, Obama is asking as ISIS is claiming to have taken over a city in a third country, Jordan, a development that threatens to become a tipping point that turns a regional conflict into a far broader war, inevitably increasing pressure on Israel and the U.S. to intervene.
Then, too, the President’s $ 500 million ask appears to be considerably less than advertised.
As The New York Times reported in a devastating dispatch, “military and State Department officials indicated that there were not yet any specific programs to arm and train the rebels that the money would fund, nor could administration officials specify which moderate Syrian opposition members they intended to train and support, or where they would be trained.”
Obama put in the bid a month after delivering a widely panned speech that the White House had advertised as a major explanation of the President’s foreign policy principles — six years into his administration, when no explanation should have been necessary. The address had only one substantive announcement, a $ 5 billion counterterrorism fund to support allies in the Middle East.
But, The Times reports, that, too, was a headline in search of a program, with neither Defense nor State even having had a plan for spending that money when Obama announced it.
While the President makes behind-the-times requests and announces plans that amount to wait-and-see-what-happens, facts on the ground continue to spin rapidly out of control.
In addition to the reported incursion of ISIS into Jordan, the Iraqi Kurds are seizing territory that they vow not to relinquish while referring to ISIS as their new neighboring government.
What’s more, the Free Syrian Army, the group to which Obama would presumably send arms, is now so openly corrupt and useless that Syria’s opposition leadership announced it would “disband the Supreme Military Council and refer its members to the government’s financial and administration committee for investigation.”
When Obama withdrew all American forces from Iraq at the end of 2011, after failing to secure the agreement needed to keep a small force there, he called it an “extraordinary accomplishment,” with us “leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.”
Less than three years later, Iraq is no longer stable or self-reliant, and is hardly sovereign. The world is plainly not more secure for our departure. No wonder that Americans have turned thumbs down on this President’s foreign policy.
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