The day after the President of the
United States gave his first wartime speech, 13 years into America's long march
against Islamic extremism, his Secretary of State declared we were not at war
with ISIS but “What we are doing is engaging
in a very significant counter-terrorism operation, and it's going to go on for
some period of time".
This confusion was echoed
by Susan Rice and Marie Harf and contradicted by Josh Ernest at the White House
and at the Pentagon. It seemed lost on some that Obama was basing his authority
to go to war without Congressional authority on the 2001 and 2003 resolutions
against al-Qaeda. The 2001 resolution mentioned "war" four times and the 2003
mentioned it nine times.
This was
followed by the British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond telling reporters at a news conference in Berlin: Let me
be clear; Britain will not be taking part in any air strikes in Syria." He said
London won't be "revisiting" the issue after Parliament decided last year
against participating in air strikes. Number 10 Downing Street then had to walk
that back by saying that P.M. David Cameron had not yet decided on air
strikes. (However after the Saturday release of a You Tube video of the
decapitation of British aid worker, David Cawthorne Haines, that could
change dramatically.)
It all went down hill after
that with Germany stating that they were not yet in the coalition followed by
Turkey and then Saudi Arabia announcing that their contribution would be only
the training of the Syrian Free Army on Saudi territory.
Friday it got worse with
the CIA in a surprise release stating that ISIS had grown by as much as 300%
since June and now numbered between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters in the terror
army. This would make ISIS the 76th largest army out of 106 forces in the
world. It should be remembered that when they took Fallujah in the beginning of
2014 they were estimated to be around 4000 strong.
