Another Terrorist Strike, Another Obama Lecture

The president knows that the U.S. could defeat Islamic State outright, but he lacks the political will to lead the fight.

President Obama’s weekly radio address on Saturday was his latest attempt to reassure the country that the U.S. is making significant progress in the fight against Islamic terrorism, notwithstanding the Brussels airport attack last week and the Paris massacre in November. Alas, it didn’t take long for reality to contradict the soothing rhetoric. The very next day, a Taliban splinter group inspired by Islamic State bombed a crowded park in Lahore, Pakistan, killing more than 70 people, mostly women and children.

“Members of the Christian community who were celebrating Easter today were our prime target,” a Taliban spokesman told NBC News. And the women and children weren’t collateral damage, mind you, they were the targets, according to Lahore’s police chief. Americans argue over whether hardened jihadists should be waterboarded, while the terrorists prey on the softest of targets.

Pakistan is a country of 190 million people, and 97% identify as Muslim. Christians make up less than 2% of the population but are under constant attack from Islamic terrorists. More than a dozen people died in two church bombings in Lahore last April, and some 80 people were killed in a 2013 church bombing in the city of Peshawar. Yet Mr. Obama spent the second half of his radio address lecturing Americans on the importance of religious tolerance.

The administration rightly and understandably touts the military progress being made against Islamic State, or ISIS. Several high-ranking ISIS members have been killed in recent months, and territory in Iraq and Syria once held by the group has been taken back. But ISIS continues to win the propaganda battle that matters most to its recruitment efforts. Its ability to carry out or inspire terror attacks seemingly at will in major Western European cities and elsewhere in the world gives the impression that the group is ascendant. Earlier this month, terror attacks in the Ivory Coast and Turkey killed a total of 39 people. It was the fourth attack in Turkey since October.

Mr. Obama’s response to this mayhem is to the stay the course, even if it means enduring a terror attack—a Brussels or Paris or San Bernardino—now and then. He wants us to get used to this new normal. The president knows that the U.S. has the ability and wherewithal to defeat ISIS outright, but he lacks the political will to lead the fight. In his view, an enemy that can hurt America but not defeat her militarily is best dealt with through a policy of containment. Hence the U.S. fight against ISIS has consisted mainly of airstrikes and support for regional ground forces, without direct military intervention.

The New York Times recently reported that the Pentagon had presented the White House “with the most detailed set of military options yet for attacking the growing Islamic State threat in Libya,” where U.S. officials believe the group may be setting up a new base. The White House’s response? The “plan is not being actively considered, at least for now,” said the paper, “while the Obama administration presses ahead with a diplomatic initiative to form a unity government from rival factions inside Libya.”

Mr. Obama’s biggest foreign-policy blunder was drawing a red line on the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then not enforcing it, which ultimately facilitated the spread of ISIS. The administration badly underestimated what would quickly become the world’s most ruthless terror group, and now it may be overestimating its ability to deal with Islamic State’s homicidal leaders diplomatically.

Graeme Wood, a terrorism scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, has noted that Islamic State “rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.”

Read Jeffrey Goldberg’s profile of Mr. Obama in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine, and you might come away thinking that the president’s concern for his own legacy plays a not-so-small role in his antiterror thinking. “The message Obama telegraphed in speeches and interviews was clear,” writes Mr. Goldberg. “He would not end up like the second President Bush—a president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation, even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term.”

Mr. Bush prioritized national security, not improving his personal popularity or burnishing his image for posterity. Apparently Mr. Obama sees that as a flaw.

This post originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal

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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal