Obama Alone Not to Blame for Jihadist Resurgence

ISIS Rebels

In his latest article in National Review, AFLC Advisory Board Member Andrew C. McCarthy takes aim at “Beltway Republicans” who are blaming President Obama alone for the jihadist resurgence in Iraq. While Obama’s foreign policy of appeasement to Islamists has undermined American national security and destabilized the Middle East, McCarthy argues in detail that the jihadist uprising was inevitably set in motion in 2008 when the Bush administration entered into a status of forces agreement (SOFA) with Nouri al-Maliki’s churlish Shiite government.

As McCarthy adroitly points out:

Let’s not pretend, though, that America’s Middle East mess is strictly an Obama production. Today, a Sunni jihadist in Iraq might be killed by an American drone in support, incredibly, of the Iranian military intervention to prop up Iraq’s Shiite government. But if that same Sunni jihadist instead crosses the border into Syria, he will be given American-supplied weapons to fight against the Iranian military intervention that props up Syria’s Shiite government.

That kind of insanity does not happen overnight. It happens after more than 20 years of willful blindness to the ideology of our enemies, and more than 20 years without a strategic vision of the global jihadist challenge.