Krauthammer: Obama ‘Pretends’ Strategy Is to Destroy ISIS

Columnist Charles Krauthammer argued that President Obama “pretends that the strategy is to destroy ISIS because he has to” on Monday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel.

“I think there is a strategy, but Obama won’t say it. He pretends that the strategy is to destroy ISIS because he has to, because when he didn’t, he really got savaged from all sides. But there actually is a strategy implicit in what he’s doing. And that is you roll back Iraq, slowly, but you don’t do anything in Syria of any importance. So, what he’s doing, what the strategy actually is, unspoken, but you can interpret the movements that we’re doing on the ground in this way we’re going to try to say, for example, to re-capture Mosul…the objective over the following year [will be] to roll them back in Iraq, but leave them, essentially, unmolested in Syria because, if you want to actually accomplish that, then you have to have a major ground war. You leave Syria, I assume, for the next presidency. I’m not approving of the strategy, but that is the strategy” he stated.

Krauthammer continued, “the objective he’s enunciated is a false objective. That is not the objective of this administration, it is containment in Syria, roll back in Iraq, that’s exactly what he’s doing. And the tragedy is, that we would have had the option of doing the roll back everywhere had Obama not liquidated all the positions of strength that we had in 2011, the air bases, the intelligence, the tremendous influence that we had on the government in Iraq, and on the Kurds, and elsewhere. But he gave it all away and now we’re starting from scratch. And that’s the tragedy at the root of this.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

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