I wrote about the war against the Islamic State in Politico today:

Compared with President Barack Obama, even Jimmy Carter is John McCain. The former president practically synonymous with American weakness and retreat thinks Obama was too slow to act against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and gives his current strategy only “a possibility of success,” provided it involves (unspecified) ground troops.
When you are too passive for Jimmy Carter, it’s time for some soul-searching in the Situation Room. The late-1970s are calling and want their foreign policy back.
The war against ISIL so far is desultory and occasional, a campaign of underwhelming force. ISIL has still been on the verge of taking the Syrian town of Khobani abutting the Turkish border and on the offensive in Iraq. The erstwhile JV team is defying all the military might that the world’s lone superpower is willing to muster.
There has been renewed talk of how, as former secretary of defense Leon Panetta put it the other day, the fight against terrorism will be a 30-year war. At this rate, it will be a generational struggle merely to get ISIL out of Mosul.