Washington Post rips 'petulant-sounding' President Obama on Paris attacks and ISIS

Greg P. | 8:56 AM on November 17, 2015

Yesterday we told you how President Obama seemed annoyed during a press conference at the G20 economic conference in Antalya, Turkey when asked a question about his once referring to ISIS as the “JV team.” And many thought he only exhibited any real passion at the presser was when he attacked the GOP for criticizing his plan — you know, his real enemy.

Well, add the editorial board of the Washington Post to the list of those not happy with what he had to say.

In a scathing editorial up this morning, they’re calling the president “petulant-sounding” and hitting him for saying there are no other legitimate ideas presented by critics on how to fight and defeat ISIS:

https://twitter.com/applecore6ca/status/666596907473588224

Washpost editorial: President Obama’s false choice against the Islamic State https://t.co/uoBAHsDADM

— Jackson Diehl (@JacksonDiehl) November 17, 2015

Here’s the opener:

PRESSED ABOUT his strategy for fighting the Islamic State, a petulant-sounding President Obama insisted Monday, as he has before, that his critics have offered no concrete alternatives for action in Syria and Iraq, other than putting “large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground.” This claim was faulty in two respects. First, few if any White House critics are proposing a U.S. ground operation on the scale of the previous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, military experts both within and outside the administration have proposed more modest measures that could significantly increase the pressure on the Islamic State if the president were to adopt them.

Mr. Obama is right that the route to destroying the Islamic State lies in finding local partners in the Middle East and elsewhere who can stabilize their countries with U.S. and other international support. If that broad strategy is correct, however, its implementation has been consistently underpowered. U.S. aid to Iraqi and Syrian allies has been too small and too slow to arrive; airstrikes have been conducted at a fraction of the pace of previous campaigns.