Obama Says ISIL Is ‘Cancer.’ But Is the U.S. Ready for More Chemo?

On Wednesday afternoon, President Obama
made a statement on the brutal murder of journalist James Foley
at the hands of ISIL, a terrorist group with stated plans
to establish a new Islamic caliphate over the Middle East. Obama
castigated ISIL’s radical ideology as something that “no just God
would stand for.” The president vowed to “do what is necessary to
see that justice is done.” ISIL, he said, is a “cancer,” that the
whole world must work to extract.

But if ISIL is a cancer, is the U.S. really ready for another
dose of chemotherapy? Have not the last 10 years demonstrated that
American military involvement in Iraq is counterproductive and
costly?

Sen. Obama understood this—or at least pretended to understand
this—when he ran for election in 2008, pledging to withdraw from
Iraq and correct a neoconservative foreign policy blunder. Now, of
course, President Obama is escalating American
bombing of Iraq under the ever-broadening rationale of
humanitarianism, fighting evil, etc.

Americans should know by now where this road ends,
writes the Cato Institute’s Benjamin H. Friedman:

Americans, the president included, need to admit being out of
Iraq potentially means letting it burn. The collapse of
the fiction that
U.S. forces stabilized Iraq before exiting forces us to confront
the unpleasant contradictions in U.S. goals there. We want to avoid
the tragic costs of U.S. forces trying to suppress
Iraq’s violence. We want a stable Iraqi federal government and
we want Iraqis to live peacefully. Each of those goals
conflicts with the others. …

We should know by
now that we lack the ability to stabilize Iraq at acceptable cost.
We should also know that the primary threat to U.S. security in
Iraq is the temptation to try to forcefully run it. Knowing these
things means accepting some tragedy in Iraq.

As savage as ISIL may be, there is every reason to think that
another War in Iraq—coming on the heels of the last war, which
failed miserably to achieve any objective at a reasonable cost,
human or financial—would be the greatest tragedy of all.