Rich Lowry of National Review explores President Obama’s record on national security.
President Barack Obama desperately wanted to be a peacetime president, yet is ending his second term with Islamic terror attacks looming larger than at any time since 9/11.
The tide of war isn’t receding, as he famously contended in a speech on the Afghan drawdown in 2011; it is lapping onto our shores.
The Left hates the notion that George W. Bush “kept us safe,” but after September 11 — a plot set in motion before he took office — Bush prevented another significant attack the rest of his presidency, at a time when a follow-on strike here at home seemed all but inevitable.
It was easy to take this achievement for granted, especially given that Bush’s success itself diminished the urgency people felt about the terror threat. But with two domestic terror attacks in the past six months killing more than 60 people and wounding more than 70, the long stretch of safety at home is harder to dismiss.
The rise of terror attacks within the U.S. — in addition to the mayhem in San Bernardino and Orlando, there has been a drumbeat of smaller attacks — corresponds with ISIS conquering and holding swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq. It isn’t a coincidence. …
… President Obama’s view is that attacks like the one on the Pulse nightclub aren’t an existential threat. While he certainly doesn’t want them to happen and finds them horrible and wrenching, they are the implicit price of what he conceives as a prudently crafted anti-ISIS strategy — in other words, one that doesn’t have to show much urgency about defeating the terror group and limits the resources devoted to fighting it.
So long as ISIS looks as though it is successfully resisting its enemies, though, it has a magnetic appeal to potential loyalists in the West.
