Is there no one in Obama’s Cabinet with the brains or the balls to tap him on the shoulder, or hit him on the head, and tell him that he ought not tell the enemy what his battle plans are? Whatever your position on Syria, you must admit that bombing them now would be a waste of good cruise missiles. Obama has publicized where he plans to strike and has made it clear that he only intends to do it once. How can he not understand that any reasonable despot would be shuttling his chemical weapons to clandestine bunkers and is hunkering down waiting for the ‘narrow’ attack so that when it passes he can get on with the business of massacring more Syrians?

It has been over a year since Obama made his remark about chemical weapons ‘moving around or being utilized’ as crossing a red line. The signal his dithering sends to our enemies is irreparable and humiliating. We live in the cross hairs of every rogue state on the planet and our suffering at their hands, and our half-baked, intrusive domestic security efforts, will not end until we solve the root cause of the problem. It is possible that we can continue to tiptoe through a diplomatic version of the Cold War’s Mutually Assured Destruction policy with Russia and China. However, those two aside, every other country bent on doing the United States harm, with the exception of North Korea, is an Islamic state. We have been at war with Islam since Thomas Jefferson sent the Marines to the Barbary Coast in 1803 and it is time we face the ugly reality of it.

The whining on the street about Iraq not having weapons of mass destruction forgets that Hussein gassed the Kurds. Are we not better off without him? The second invasion of Iraq may well have been ill advised—the matter should have been settled the first time. It is also hard to deny that our exit from Iraq was a colossal blunder. Those people are clearly not capable of governing themselves. Even in the light of that failure, we are poised to repeat it when, after announcing the date, we will quit Afghanistan sometime in 2014. Surely the Taliban won’t mind taking a year long vacation while they wait to resume their atrocities.

Recently there is happy talk of negotiating with the Taliban. Is there any precedent for this? We might recall the tremendous success Neville Chamberlain had when he negotiated with Hitler for Czechoslovakia. No one has succeeded in pacifying Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. Turning our backs to one of the least civilized Muslim states is not in our best interest.

We have met the enemy. This time it was at the polling place, and once again, he is us.

PS: The latest news on the issue is that Obama is going to let Congress decide whether to bomb Syria. Given that this is the only time he has shown interest in what someone else thinks, it can only be a ploy to blame the outcome, whatever it is, on the Republicans. The Commander in Chief has the mind of a child.