The Reluctant Warrior

U.S. President Barack Obama's soaring rhetoric of peace and hope clutched the American electorate, tired of being involved in foreign wars in their heart of hearts with his promise to bring the troops home. He did that. It took time, but he pulled American troops out of Iraq, withdrawing them completely from Afghanistan shortly as well, promised fulfilled. He campaigned on the emphatic promise that he would turn America toward a new beginning. Starting all over again, he would make everything right.

He extended a promise to the Muslim world as well, in travelling to Egypt and extending the American hand of friendship from Cairo as the new President of the United States of America who was prepared to start all over again in America's relationship with Islam. He knew Islam, was directly exposed to it as a child growing up in Indonesia where he was in direct contact with a majority Muslim population. As the child of a Muslim man from Kenya, though raised himself as a Christian, President Obama feels he has special insights into Islam.

His special insight aside, when his predecessor was faced with the incredulity of being at the helm when a massive atrocity was visited upon New York and Washington under his watch, George W. Bush reacted much as his successor later did; 'forgiving' Islam, denying that the virulently hateful Islamists who had just brought death and destruction to his country represented Islam. One of his first presidential acts was his conciliatory visit a mosque to give assurances.

But the Islamists, identified as al-Qaeda operatives with Osama bin Laden their chief inspiration, who had planned the carnage were to be sought out and punished, including bin Laden. It was not for lack of trying that U.S. forces in Afghanistan were unable to pin bin Laden down for he was protected by one of America's leading regional supporters in the fight against terrorism, Pakistan itself. Where Mr. Bush's strategies to bring bin Laden to justice had failed, the peace president's efforts were more successful. The result? a furious Pakistan.

Yet the threat of Islamist terror has never melted into history; instead it grew and it metastasized, land continues to threaten and confront its own world of Islam and the world outside Islam. George W. Bush once beamed with satisfaction that American response to violent jihad had taken al-Qaeda out of action, and that he had overseen the downthrow of a brutal Muslim dictator in Iraq.

President Bush gives a "thumbs-up" sign after declaring the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP) 

Now the President for Peace in his turn has squirmed and feinted, threatened, and withdrawn into golf as a fallback to adjourning his advisers in the War Room to consult and to advise and to conclude but Islamism has battered down the steel door he slammed shut to isolate himself and his authority from making decisions contrary to his nature and his promise to Americans. 

He needn't have been too concerned on the latter, since with the predatorily vicious Islamic State lunatics choosing to entertain the world with the spectre of American journalists being beheaded, Americans want revenge.

Leaving the U.S. once again to march off to war. Oh, not war, a limited series of airstrikes. It will be up to America's allies with another ... oops! ... Coalition of the Willing, to do the heavy lifting on the ground. As though, even while Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, pledged to uphold their part of the 'bargain' they have now signed on to, would ever be prepared to boot up their military on the ground and actually physically do battle with the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham.

And, despite the ferocity of the Middle East and Southeast Asia and North African Islamist meltdown with jihadis going berserk in their bloodlust terrorizing and brutalizing, engaging in ethnic cleansing and sectarian Kalashnikov upsmanship, the threat of nuclear weaponization looming from one country, another unleashing mass poison chemical attacks on its own civilians, another country that the U.S. had helped liberate from a dictator falling so deeply into jihad America's ambassador was felled, President Obama hastens to assure the Islamic ummah that he knows Islam so intimately he is confident in expressing his view that Islam is not complicit with violence.

Obama’s pledge came a day after Isis released video showing the killing of US journalist Steven Sotloff. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images