![]() Even when he did take action, as in Libya, he got out so quickly that more chaos followed. If the prior administration had erred in the direction of being too quick to intervene, Obama was the opposite. If anything, Obama had pressed to get every last troop out of Iraq before Baghdad was ready to handle its own security problems, before it had resolved its own internal political problems. Getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan was what he had entered the White House to do. Last year, the president almost acted against the Damascus regime, but even then, even in the face of chemical weapons atrocities, he was so committed to resisting the lure of this region’s unending wars that he pulled back at the last minute from even a fairly modest military intervention. His advisors, notably former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former CIA director David Petraeus, urged him to take action to help contain the devastation. The carnage of Syria, the crucible in which the Islamic State was forged, had been as horrific a humanitarian crisis as had emerged during his watch as president. As the Islamic State rampaged - virtually unchecked - across the Levant in recent months, it became clear not only that something must be done but that there might be a ready coalition in place to help do it. The fact that IS, during the course of the past year, has gained control of large swaths of Iraq and is threatening to install its self-described caliphate in the heart of an already volatile region created a strategic threat - not only to American interests but also to a broad cross-section of U.S. The deaths of two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, have galvanized public attention and offered graphic testimony to the manifest evil of the extremists’ tactics and intentions. But the threat posed by the rise of the radical jihadist Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq has proven too great to ignore. This was not what Barack Obama had envisioned for his presidency. ![]() ![]() Article content This was not what Barack Obama had envisioned for his presidency. ![]()
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