CAN HE HOLD OUT?

(This post is written on December 7th, Remember Pearl Harbor 74 yrs ago)

Holy Cow, as recently as November 22, 2015,* I wrote a piece titled Our Collective Nervous Breakdown, and now we have had a terrorist attack in California with 14 people killed and 21 injured and people are ready to send a major ground force to the Middle East to destroy ISIS (polls say 57% in favor of this).  Please remember that on a average day in America around 30 people are murdered by guns and we accept that so the day in California could easily fit into a normal day.

So President Obama is grudgingly giving ground to these demands by first sending 50 special forces to Syria to do things and now maybe 200 more to Iraq to conduct raids, train, rescue, and generally do things against ISIS.  But so far, he is not panicing and sending a major force to "kill" ISIS.  First of all we are bound to lose many more troops in an ISIS ground war than are killed by terrorist attacks in America.  Even in response to 9/11 in which nearly 3,000 people died we lost almost twice as many troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan** as in this major terrorist attack.  In addition we had vastly more troops injured, many with life altering injuries including those whose brains got shook up by IED devices.  Some of these are essentially walking dead.

So can President Obama hold out against the calls for a large military expeditionary force to combat ISIS?  He has about 14 months to go in his presidency.  Time will tell.  In the meantime, we will have something like 12,000 people in America murdered by guns and perhaps 18,000 committing suicide with guns.  We will have about 30,0000 American killed in automobile accidents.  But of course, these are just normal life in America.  In contrast we probably will have a good deal fewer than 100 killed by terrorists.  These, however, are intolerable.

* http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2015/11/our-collective-nervous-breakdown.html
** I did support the war in Afghanistan because I felt we had to do something in response even if it was a failure, but I have never understood why we went into Iraq.