Spinning, Not Winning

If Baghdad Bob and Hillary Clinton had a love child, he’d probably be hard at work for the Obama administration, denying the importance of ISIS’s gains in Iraq.

Bob was Saddam Hussein’s mouthpiece during the 2003 liberation of Iraq. As Coalition forces advanced on the capital, he kept insisting, “All is well.”

Hillary, meanwhile, evaded questions about the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi with the infamous line, “What difference at this point does it make?” Team Obama combines the two tactics. The loss of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province, is a distinct sign that President Obama’s antiISIS strategy is failing. And all the efforts, from the president on down, to pretend otherwise won’t make it so.

Obama himself Thursday blamed Iraqi security forces for Ramadi’s fall — a “tactical setback” he suggested had been inevitable because it was “vulnerable.”

This, when just two days before, Marine Corps Gen. Thomas Weidley insisted ISIS was “on the defensive” in Iraq and would soon be repelled from Ramadi.

The president’s chief spokesman, Josh Earnest, even mocked critics by asking: “Are we going to light our hair on fire every time there is a setback?”

The president may insist he doesn’t “think we’re losing,” but ISIS now controls half of Iraq, half of Syria and a sizable chunk of both southern Lebanon and Libya.

For all the excuses, the Islamic State is gaining. And it’s delusional to suggest that this doesn’t mean the US coalition is losing.

Yet America’s leaders won’t contemplate any military option besides air strikes, which are demonstrably not enough. The best it can come up with is to make common cause with Shiite militias allied with Iran.

Oh, and Secretary of State John Kerry’s hollow vow that Ramadi’s fall “will be reversed.”

Obama and the rest of the left once delighted in ridiculing George W. Bush as hopelessly out of touch on Iraq. Bush’s successor is starting to merit the same ridicule.