To beat ISIS, America needs clarity
Chicago Tribune
More than a week after the massacre in Paris, the people Americans pay to exert leadership against mortal foes instead are distractedly squabbling among themselves. Some presidential candidates of both major parties are proving similarly feckless about how robustly to wage an unorthodox war we’re already fighting.
So far this is more a missed opportunity for the preoccupied politicians than it is a new crisis of confidence among citizens. But stir in additional terrorist assaults and Americans will intensify two blindingly obvious questions that nobody at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue has properly answered: Who on Earth is responsible for defeating (no, not containing) this vicious, capable enemy of liberal civilization? And what are the lengths and limits of this nation’s role in that fight?
President Francois Hollande and the forces of France are spearheading the war he has declared against Islamic State. We applaud the successful tactics to apprehend plotters and disrupt working plots.
Not that France’s muscular response halted all high-profile terrorist assaults. Friday’s hostagetaking and slaughter at the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali, added an unhelpful dimension: Two groups, one affiliated with al-Qaida, claimed responsibility for that bloodshed. Was this intramural competition with Islamic State? Some unlikely collusion among rivals in its timing? Or just further evidence that Islamist extremism is enjoying a still unrelieved growth phase?
Hollande is shopping for aggressive warriors in Washington, Moscow and beyond. Beijing, too, wants a piece of Islamic State. To read the headlines, you’d think this is the only world war in which most of the world is on one side.
Yet the U.S. discussion sounds less driven by national security than by national politics. Dueling House and Senate members yearn to dwell on partisan talking points — hawkish, dovish, exclusionary, welcoming — in an election cycle. And a president fast approaching civilian life visibly resents a war that threatens his preferred legacy.
The issue of resettling refugees here is important on many levels. But it’s not the only important issue, or the most time-sensitive.
Washington is embarrassingly disunited, officially directionless — and at war. Obama pledged in a September 2014 speech to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State. He alone has set war policy.
We’ve instead asked Congress to give this president and future presidents a full-throated, bipartisan commitment. We reiterate that point post-Paris because (1) it is lawmakers’ solemn responsibility to authorize wars, and (2) setting goals and limits for this fight would focus politicians and all Americans on winning it.
A third reason that we can’t state too often: If presidents and members of Congress are willing to watch young Americans fight for this country, those officials ought to formally accept the less dangerous job of standing with them.