December 09, 2015 01:13 PM UTC

Cory Gardner Concern Trolls Obama On ISIS

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Durango Herald’s Peter Marcus reports, Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado is very, very upset with President Barack Obama’s handling of the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), especially after last week’s apparent terror attack in San Bernardino carried out by persons at least passively radicalized by ISIS propaganda.

So upset that he’s calling for…well, something more to be done:

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner on Tuesday said President Barack Obama’s strategy to defeat the Islamic State terrorist group is the “same ineffective approach.”

Gardner, a Yuma Republican, joined other senators in sending a letter to Obama after the president’s rare Oval Office address on Sunday. Obama called on the Republican-controlled Congress to authorize military force to fight the terrorist group.

“If Congress believes, as I do, that we are at war with ISIL,” Obama said, using another acronym for the Islamic State, “it should go ahead and vote to authorize the continued use of military force against these terrorists.”

The president has been demanding the authorization for over a year…

Gardner’s response? Well, it’s hard to say what exactly he wants:

The president has pushed to train and equip Iraqi and Syrian rebel forces, and he has sent military trainers to Iraq and U.S. special operations to Syria. Obama rejects the idea of sending combat troops, stating that the move would only help ISIS recruit.

In the letter sent Tuesday with Gardner’s support, the senators say the president must “break this stalemate,” while calling on him to outline a military strategy…

And what might that military strategy against ISIS consist of? We’ve read Gardner’s letter a few times now, and we still can’t find the words “boots on the ground.” Or for that matter, anything meaningful to differentiate his strategy from what Obama is already doing:

U.S. military advisors…
Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs)…
Close air support…
Airstrike approval process…

If you were looking for Sen. Gardner’s “silver bullet” recommendation for winning the war against ISIS, you won’t find it in this letter. In fact, there’s nothing we can see in this letter that seems like a major departure from President Obama’s present strategy against ISIS–certainly nothing to justify Gardner’s professed disappointment with Obama’s “ineffective approach.” Obama deployed several hundred advisors to help fight ISIS over the summer. Following ISIS-claimed attacks on France and Russia, the multinational force arrayed against ISIS is growing stronger by the day.

It’s been a very long time in American history since we’ve seen anything like authentic unity on foreign policy issues. The consensus to fight back after the 9/11 attacks quickly broke down as the Bush administration pursued the invasion of a nation that had nothing to do with those attacks–a cardinal error that contributed directly to the rise of ISIS in subsequent years. What we’re seeing in Gardner’s “response” to Obama appears to be a petulant determination to criticize the President’s strategy no matter what it is–even, as appears to be the case here, when there’s not much difference in strategy at all.

And however you feel about the issue at hand, that’s no way to show leadership.