This is what it looks like in a vacuum: Slaughter. Mayhem. Chaos.
This is what it looks like when the Leader of the Free World decides America would be better off if the United States took its hand off the tiller.
Two Americans have now been beheaded in professionally produced videos — and between those slaughters, our president announced to the world he doesn’t “have a strategy yet” to go after the group doing the beheading.
Forget that Steven Sotloff and James Wright Foley were journalists, which has been the solipsistic focus of the journalists writing about them. What these two did for a living was why they were in the wrong place at the wrong time; it’s not why ISIS kidnapped them or killed them.
ISIS kidnapped them because they were Americans, and killed them because they were Americans. Their murders are a warning to every American.
That’s what the British-accented ISIS monster who narrates the footage and does the killings explicitly said yesterday in the Sotloff video.
“Just as your missiles continue to strike our people,” he declared, “our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people.”
There aren’t many Americans within ISIS’s reach — yet. That’s why they took journalists. But there are reportedly hundreds of Americans learning the terror craft under its aegis right now, and thousands of Europeans.
Just what do you suppose they’re being taught?
The Obama vacuum is imploding America’s interests elsewhere in the Middle East, and North Africa as well.
You probably didn’t hear the great sucking sound coming from Tripoli, Libya, last weekend as the grounds of our embassy there were raided and taken over by extremists.
We abandoned the place a month ago, with US diplomatic personnel evacuated by helicopter to Malta in a disturbing parallel to the flight from Saigon in April 1975.
Remember this: That embassy is considered American territory under international law.
Libya is the nation whose dictator we chose to help take out in the famous “leading from behind” campaign, after which we promptly hightailed it out of there — creating the vacuum in which our ambassador and three other Americans were slaughtered two years ago.
In that case, action followed by inaction created the vacuum. In Syria and Iraq, the great advance of ISIS is the result of inaction — the president’s announcement in August 2013 that he would bomb the Syrian regime’s assets because it had used chemical weapons, and then his failure to do so.
And so it has rampaged.
If you want to know why ISIS might look at the United States and see what Osama bin Laden once called a “weak horse,” and why it thought it could move into Iraq with impunity, you need look no further than that.
The president decided America was through with war in the Middle East. The vacuum his fecklessness has created is sucking us back in — and in a far worse tactical and strategic condition than we were before.