Obama’s remarks came after a meeting with his National Security Council, during which he spent a significant amount of time detailing all the many successes his strategy is having against the Islamic State (which Obama calls ISIL instead of ISIS), progress that he thinks is being obscured by recent terrorist attacks in the U.S. committed in the name of ISIS.
Here are the relevant parts of Obama’s statement.
“We are making significant progress. ... This campaign at this stage is firing on all cylinders. ... ISIL is under more pressure than ever before.
“ISIL continues to lose key leaders. ... ISIL continues to lose ground in Iraq. ... ISIL continues to lose ground in Syria as well.
“As ISIL continues to lose territory, it also continues to lose the money that is its lifeblood. ... ISIL is now effectively cut off from the international financial system.
“ISIL’s ranks are shrinking as well. Their morale is sinking. ... The flow of foreign fighters -- including from America to Syria and Iraq -- has plummeted.
“In fact, our intelligence community now assesses that the ranks of ISIL fighters have been reduced to the lowest levels in more than 2-1/2 years.”
Obama went on to say that “lone actors,” like the Orlando terrorist, “or small cells of terrorists are very hard to detect and very hard to prevent.” And the best way to deal with this threat, he went on to argue, is with stricter gun-control laws.
Sounds like Obama’s really on top of the situation, doesn’t it?
Except that on Thursday, CIA Director John Brennan told a far different story about ISIS.
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brennan said that, yes, “the U.S.-led coalition has made important progress against ISIL.” As Obama said, it's lost territory, its finances have been squeezed, and a “growing number” are “becoming disillusioned.”
But Brennan went on to say that “despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach.” (Emphasis added.)
If anything, he said, those gains that Obama brags about increase the risk of terrorist attacks in the U.S. and other European nations. “As the pressure mounts,” he said, the group “will intensify its global terror campaign.”
He told the Senators that ISIS is “training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks (and) has a large cadre of Western fighters,” and is busy trying to infiltrate the West through “refugee flows, smuggling routes and legitimate means of travel.”
No wonder Obama wants to make the two most recent attacks on U.S. soil -- both of which were inspired by ISIS and which claimed a total of 63 innocent lives -- a debate about gun control and lone wolves. Otherwise, he’d have to admit that his war against ISIS isn’t actually making any progress.
Too bad for Obama that Brennan didn’t get the memo. But if the country is actually going to defeat ISIS at home and abroad, it will take more of Brennan’s realism and less of Obama’s self-congratulation.
