The Obama White House is giving ISIS a 45 minute warning before bombing their oil tankers by dropping leaflets advising potential jihadists to flee before air strikes in Syria.Okay. Forty Five minutes maybe seems a bit excessive, but unless the drivers are able to drive their trucks out of harm's way in that interval it doesn't seem to me to be anything other than a humane effort to avoid unnecessary casualties. I don't see anything wrong with that. In fact I applaud it.
“Get out of your trucks now, and run away from them. Warning: air strikes are coming. Oil trucks will be destroyed. Get away from your oil trucks immediately. Do not risk your life,” the leaflet reads.
The leaflet drops are justified under the premise that the oil tanker drivers might be civilians and not ISIS recruits, although it’s an explanation that doesn’t wash with critics.
“It’s not like these drivers are innocent, uninvolved ‘civilians’ like children or sick people,” writes J.E. Dyer. “They’re waging ISIS’s war, just like the other non-uniformed participants who make up 100% of ISIS’s ranks. This is how far the Obama administration is going to avoid “collateral damage” — and who knows, it may be worse.”
On the other hand, I'm much more perplexed by the fact that the oil tankers are still around in the first place. President Obama launched the campaign against ISIS over a year ago and we're just now getting around to taking out their financial lifeline? What have we been bombing all this time? Speaking of which, why is it that when the French decided to hit ISIS after the Paris terror attack they were able to find a command and communication center with a munitions dump and training facility to bomb? Why was that target still available after all the explosives we were supposed to have been dropping on the ISIS psychopaths?
It sounds like our Commander in Chief has had our pilots burn a lot of jet fuel over the last year flying what pilots call lazy eights over Syria without dispatching very much ordnance on the enemy. Why?
Now comes word that the reason for President Obama's reluctance to attack the oil tankers is that he was afraid of incurring collateral environmental damage. This is stunning. He has apparently permitted ISIS to rake in billions of dollars a year selling oil on the black market, financing their crimes against humanity with the profits, because he was afraid that smoke from burning oil tankers would pollute the desert air? That just can't be right. We are to believe that he stood by watching hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Syrians and Iraqis be horribly tortured and executed all the while refusing to cripple the economic legs that supported these atrocities because he was afraid that oil would get spilled?
If that's true, if Mr. Obama is conducting this war as if he thinks that the roar of jet engines overhead is sufficient to terrify ISIS foot soldiers so much that they'll reconsider their murderous ways and link arms to sing peace on earth, good will toward men, then he's perhaps the most naive man to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Obama promised that we were going to "degrade and destroy ISIS" but at this point it looks as if he either didn't really mean it or, if he did, he has the most baffling war strategy of any president in the history of the country.