Pity America’s Friends - People in the Middle East Who Put their Trust in Barack Obama Are Suffering Right Now.

James Kirchick / National Review

In January, President Obama likened fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to a “jayvee team” in Lakers jerseys on the basketball court.

Eight months later, that squad of bloodthirsty maniacs is playing quite a game of pickup. Occupying swaths of territory stretching from Syria into Iraq, ISIS stands in control of a landmass unprecedented in the annals of terrorist organizations, makes millions of dollars a day selling oil on the black market, has beheaded men and sold women into slavery, and now threatens to kill 40,000 Yazidis — an Iraqi sect ISIS accuses of devil-worship.

It was the plight of the Yazidis, stranded on a mountain, that ultimately compelled the president to initiate a humanitarian airlift of food and water, which he announced from the White House Thursday night. The president has also authorized a limited number ofair strikes on ISIS forces approaching the Yazidis. The mission, however, according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest, will be “very limited in scope.” This led Senator John McCain, in an exclusive interview with myDaily Beast colleague Josh Rogin, to ridicule the strikes as mere “pinpricks,” a reference to Obama’s insistence last year that the strikes he briefly supported in response to Assad’s chemical-weapons attacks would not be useless.

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