Q: How is Obama's ISIS Strategy Going? A: Disastrously

But the State Dept. and White House used sad faces and hashtags! What could've gone wrong?!

Which is exactly how I and about 90% of those not smitten with Obama expected.

And tell me, where are the hashtags? I mean, how can these people understand how disapproving the Obama State Department is without some lame hashtag and sad faces?

From Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Not too much attention has been paid to our efforts to “degrade and destroy ISIS” in the past few days. Perhaps the White House can find something in this election cycle for which to be grateful, because this Washington Post report on our efforts to use proxies for that mission would otherwise dominate the news cycle. Not only has the US focused entirely on preparing our “moderate” allies in Syria for defense rather than attacking ISIS, they turned out to be incompetent even at that effort:

The Obama administration’s Syria strategy suffered a major setback Sunday after fighters linked to al-Qaeda routed U.S.-backed rebels from their main northern strongholds, capturing significant quantities of weaponry, triggering widespread defections and ending hopes that Washington will readily find Syrian partners in its war against the Islamic State.

It’s not just that they got defeated — some of them switched sides:

Moderate rebels who had been armed and trained by the United States either surrendered or defected to the extremists as the Jabhat al-Nusra group, affiliated with al-Qaeda, swept through the towns and villages the moderates controlled in the northern province of Idlib, in what appeared to be a concerted push to vanquish the moderate Free Syrian Army, according to rebel commanders, activists and analysts.
Other moderate fighters were on the run, headed for the Turkish border as the extremists closed in, heralding a significant defeat for the rebel forces Washington had been counting on as a bulwark against the Islamic State.

Michael Totten says that Syria is gone, and so is any hope of containing ISIS without boots on the ground:

They were bad proxies anyway. The Syrian Revolutionary Front was an Islamist organization. Less deranged than Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, sure, but it was still an Islamist organization. Harakat Hazm is more secular, but it consists of a measly 5,000 fighters while the Islamic State has as many as 100,000.
Syria is gone. The only portions of that former country that may still be salvageable are the Kurdish scraps in the north. The Kurds are good fighters and they may be able to hold on with our help, but there is no chance they will ever destroy the Assad regime or the Islamic State. They don’t have the strength or the numbers.
So unless the United States decides to invade outright with ground forces—and fat chance of that happening any time soon—we’re going to have to accept that the geographic abstraction once known as Syria will be a terrorist factory for the foreseeable future.  

[...]  

In other words, good luck trying to “degrade and destroy” ISIS through the weak proxies on either side of the former Iraqi-Syrian border. As Totten writes, until we decide that this mission is worth doing ourselves, it won’t get done at all — or will it? The AP reported today that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are considering the formation of a ground force to intervene in the conflict, which might help in Syria — but might touch off a bigger war, since those nations want to push Bashar al-Assad out of power, too, and counter the influence of Iran

So, we could very well see a major war triggered by Obama's stupid withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. And all of this to score some political points with Obama's Leftist base. Nice job.

It's odd that this Administration's two-pronged diplomatic strategy of putting pressure to the point of betrayal on Israel, while saying dumb and disingenuous crap to make Arabs feel better about themselves hasn't magically solved all the Middle East's problems. Weird.

Of course, the Left's interests do not lie in what's best for the US and its allies the Middle East. It's mostly about what will make the American Left feel better about themselves. Undoing Bush's work in Iraq, pulling out of Afghanistan, and releasing terrorists from Guantanamo has never been about "doing good," but is instead about righting the imperialism and arrogance Americans have shown under Bush. If this results in a major war, or mass killing, or terrorist attacks, or beheadings then so be it. In fact, it then gives them a chance to show how impotently compassionate they are with their #BringBackOurGirls and #UnitedForUkraine campaigns.