President Obama’s use of statistics to portray his ISIS strategy as a success is “reminiscent” of the Vietnam War, Charles Krauthammer said tonight on Fox News’s Special Report.
His problem is he’s trying to convince us that we are actually prevailing, winning, pushing in on ISIS. The fact is, his own chairman of his chiefs of staff told Congress we had not contained ISIS. We had Feinstein, the leading Democrat in the Senate Intelligence Committee, say that it is expanding. We had the secretary of defense — Obama own secretary of defense — last week telling Congress that we have not contained ISIS. It’s obviously expanded. We have got Beirut, we have got Paris, we have San Bernardino, we have the attack in the Sinai, we have ISIS establishing a colony in the city of Sirte in Libya. This is sort of an actual imperial expansion with satellite. And Obama is still trying to convince us that we’re winning when it’s obviously not true.
And the other thing is, when you have to resort to statistics, he has a list of people whom we’ve killed, as if anyone has any idea who they are. It’s reminiscent of the strategy of the Vietnam War where we would announce the body counts. The ratio of dead Vietcong to Americans. It was always lopsided, and we lost the damn war because that’s not how you gauge who’s winning or losing a war.