By Investor's Business Daily
War On Terror: Having ignored Iraqi pleas for air strikes in ISIL's infancy, when the terrorists could have been decimated, the administration ignores the Kurdish peshmerga plea for the same American weapons that ISIL has.
Watching the modest airstrikes on ISIL forces, we are reminded of Secretary of State John Kerry's promise that any military action in Syria would be "unbelievably small." As it turned out, it was also nonexistent, and the carnage continues in the country where ISIL formed and trained under our watchful and indifferent eyes.
The targeted airstrikes ordered by President Obama last week near the Kurdish city of Erbil in northern Iraq, where we have a consulate, as ISIL forces lay siege to thousands of hungry Yazidi and Christian refugees in the mountains of northern Iraq, are welcome.
But they fall far short of what can be or could have been done if we really wanted to stop ISIL, considered by many a greater long-term threat than al-Qaida.
"The situation near Erbil was becoming more dire than anyone expected. We didn't want another Benghazi," an administration official told the New York Times. The reference was to the deaths of four Americans in the 2012 terrorist attack on our mission in Libya, where another gathering terrorist storm was ignored and a rescue or relief attempt was never made in time.
On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham warned that ISIL threatens not just Iraqis, but also Americans here. Obama's strikes are insufficient to turn back ISIL and are meant just "to avoid a bad news story on his watch."
Graham envisions "an American city in flames" someday if the ISIL caliphate established in parts of Syria and northern Iraq becomes a new haven for global terrorism. Certainly there's already a price being paid for our past indifference to the growing ISIL threat.