Will’s Take: It’s Been an ‘Extremely Good Week for ISIS’

It has been “an extremely good week” for the Islamic State, says columnist George Will.

“Seven days passed since the president used primetime to warn the nation of the gravity of all this. And those seven days have been an extremely good week for ISIL,” he said, “because it is now clear that under no circumstances will there be troops from the United States — or anyone else.”

How to defeat the Islamic State given the strategic limitations the United States has placed on itself is a conundrum “worse than three-dimensional chess,” Will said on Tuesday’s Special Report. “You’ve got Assad, and then you’ve got various factions of varying degrees of repulsiveness — except for those we now call the ‘vetted moderates’ to whom we are somehow going to get weapons that they will use — only they will use — and that they will not use against this, that, or the other group that fails certain tests of relevance. It’s an amazing problem.”

“The fact remains, [the Islamic State] will not be defeated from the air, and no one’s coming on the ground,” Will said.