Insisting that "crush[ing]" or destroying ISIS is simply impossible to achieve, liberal Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky devoted an 11-paragraph piece entitled "Please—Let's Not Destroy ISIS" today to explaining why he "wish[es] Obama had the conviction to stand up and say" that "contain[ing] [ISIS] is what we should do" (emphasis mine):
Americans should support this mission against ISIS. One may well choose to do so warily, because, as I wrote in the wake of President Obama’s speech last week, it depends on a lot of uncontrollable variables (the Saudis behaving like good guys) against which odds are rather long. But a deeply fundamentalist nation-state in the Levant that is large and extremely wealthy would be an obvious disaster for the region and the United States a number of reasons. So we have to try to stop them.
But here’s something we’re not going to do, and I wish Obama and especially John Kerry would stop saying it. We are not going to “destroy” ISIS, to use the word Obama deployed in last week’s address (preceded by a marginally softening “ultimately”). The Islamic State will not be “crushed,” as John Kerry huffily put it in a recent tweet. This is not possible. We all know this. We’ve been trying to destroy al Qaeda for 13 years now. We have not. We will not. And we will not destroy ISIS. We can’t destroy these outfits. They’re too nimble and slippery and amorphous, and everybody knows it.
So why say it? Why not say what we hopefully can do and what we should do: contain it. We have contained al Qaeda. Some of the methods have been morally problematic (drone strikes that sometimes kill innocents, etc.), but the methods have worked. Al Qaeda, say the experts, is now probably not in a position to pull off a 9/11.
But no, I guess a president can’t say that. A president has to sound like John Wayne. It’s depressing and appalling. If he doesn’t go cowboy on us, the war hawks will call him a weakling, say he is unfit and unprepared—and in Obama’s case, they will surely add that he is unwilling—to defend “the homeland,” this phrase we’re all now supposed to use that carries a slightly totalitarian odor about it. If Obama spoke only of containment, John McCain might just have a stroke, and the Sunday shows would have to go off the air.
It's funny that Tomasky thinks only Republican "hawks" are prone to try to score cheap political points on life-and-death national security concerns. As we at the MRC originally noted back in 2003, liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd grossly distorted a comment that President George W. Bush being a degraded threat because they were put "on the run" thanks to U.S. and coalition military captures and kills of senior al Qaeda leaders. Here's how my colleague Clay Waters noted that last year:
The first major story broken by Times Watch involved deception by columnist and former White House reporter Maureen Dowd, who left out vital words from her May 14, 2003 column, "Osama's Offspring," on President Bush's pursuit of the Taliban during the Afghanistan war. Dowd used an ellipsis to totally misrepresent a Bush statement from a May 5 speech in Arkansas to imply he said the Al Qaeda terrorist network is "not a problem anymore," changing Bush's meaning to make him look naive about the war on terror.
Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. "Al Qaeda is on the run," President Bush said last week. "That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. . . . They're not a problem anymore."
But those quotes were taken wildly out of context. Here's what Bush actually said (the part Dowd left out is in italics): "Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore."
A Times spokesman insisted that Dowd's "intention was not to distort the meaning of the quote," and several newspapers who used the distorted quote issued corrections. Dowd returned to the subject in a later column that included the full quote, but without issuing an actual correction.
