National Review - What Obama Needs to Say on ISIS

Op-Ed

By Mike Pompeo

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria poses a clear and present danger to the United States and has secured a base for its attacks that is larger, wealthier, and more secure than anything in al-Qaeda's wildest dreams. The Islamic State's barbaric executions of James Foley and Steven Sotloff are the group's way of proving -- both to its Islamic brethren and to the West -- that it is serious about its threats to kill Americans.

We are already the target of the most lethal and powerful terrorist group ever to have existed. We must act now to defeat it before it is ready to strike us.

The rise of this threat should surprise no one. It has been growing since the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq at the end of 2011 and the partial collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria that same year. The only surprising thing is that President Obama has remained passive for so long in the face of massive atrocities, humanitarian catastrophe, the destruction of two Iraqi Army divisions, the conquest by an al-Qaeda splinter of a vast region in Iraq and Syria, and the deployment of Iranian military forces and Lebanese Hezbollah into those two countries. If military action should always be the last resort, we are there. Four years of passivity, diplomatic engagement, public cajoling, and speechifying have permitted the emergence of a dire threat to the United States.

In an op-ed published one year ago, I and a colleague warned that the potential for radical Islamic terror to thrive in the Levant was great and would likely lead to further regional destabilization and conflict in the absence of a forceful American response. We felt it necessary to support American efforts both to crush the Syrian puppet government supported by Iran, which had recently used chemical weapons against its own people, and, equally, to crush radical Islamists who have subsequently gained such worrisome victories.

We did not have much company in our support for the mooted "unbelievably narrow" air strikes. Many of our colleagues distrusted the president's determination and even ability to carry out a decisive action. Those sentiments were understandable, and the president's decision to forgo military action entirely and thereby allow the situation to continue to deteriorate seemed to validate those concerns.

But the situation has gotten worse. The danger to the United States is far greater than it was a year ago. Thousands of westerners, many with European and even American passports, have joined the jihad and are returning to their home countries even more radicalized, and with experience and expertise in war and terrorism. The Islamic State has apparently gained control of several dozen kilograms of radioactive material from research institutions in Mosul, Iraq. It cannot be made into a nuclear bomb, but it could be used in a "dirty bomb" to contaminate a wide area with radioactivity. We must not allow last year's mistakes to cloud our judgment today. The battlefield has now attracted other stripes of radical Islam all striving to defeat the Islamic State and fill the vacuum, mostly in the form of Iranian-supported military forces including the Hamas, Palestinian Jihad, Syrian military, the Quds force, Hezbollah, and the greater Iranian Revolutionary Guard. In other words, this area has become a veritable melting pot for America's enemies, who have all worked to attack American interests for years.

That is why I call upon the president to take military action against these threats, and I call upon my colleagues to support the effort. That action should be based on four principles:

First, we must recognize that we cannot allow the Islamic State to continue to present an existential threat to America. It is grossly inadequate simply to say, as the president has, that such groups "don't belong in the 21st century" and are "on the wrong side of history." We must instead place this threat -- with its massive persecution of Christians and murderous expansionist march against the West -- on par with those who have challenged the world order before, whether in the name of Communism, Fascism or, now, Islamism. We must commit to wipe out this threat to America using hard and soft diplomacy, American airpower, and, yes, even American ground forces in Iraq and Syria. We must strike "limited" from the American arsenal.

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