Ramadi Falls and Team Obama Sees A Success

ISIS imposes its order in newly-captured areas.

A year ago today President Obama had no strategy to address the rampaging terrorist army of ISIS because he deemed it a JV team. Late last summer, after the public beheading of an American and his island golfing vacation, Obama announced his strategy to "degrade and ultimately defeat" ISIS:

Obama's strategy involved no American boots on the ground. And it was based mainly on air power, mostly U.S. but also a coalition of Arab states.

Last weekend an unspecified number of American Special Ops boots landed on the ground in Syria and killed a senior ISIS commander and about a dozen others. The same weekend a relatively small number of ISIS troops captured Ramadi, the major provincial capital of Iraq's Anbar Province.

This despite allied air power.

And the world watched the flight of thousands of U.S.-trained Iraqi troops, abandoning additional fleets of U.S. military vehicles to the enemy.

Listen to Earnest's Comments above

Obama's press secretary was asked if this sort of event constituted the kind of "success" the administration has touted against ISIS? "Overall, yes," said Josh Earnest, earnestly.

He added, "We have seen a lot of success. But we've also seen significant periods of setback."

Barry likes to get credit for this ... OOPS!

No kidding. The loss of Ramadi. The loss of Mosul. The loss of Falluja, each of which required significant investments of American treasure and lives to capture in the first place. Poof. Lost, just like that.

We have no way of knowing what kind of glue this White House staff is sniffing. But they're taking something powerful to so seriously distort their thinking. They talk of the ebb and flow of protracted battle. This one has been mostly ebb.

An ISIS affiliate is now firmly rooted in Libya, which turned lawless after Obama's optional war to oust Moammar Gadhafi. The U.S. lost $500 million in military equipment this winter when it fled Houthi rebels and abandoned Yemen, which Obama had cited as a counter-terrorism success story as recently as last fall.

Read the rest of the ANDREW MALCOLM op-ed HERE.

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