Obama defends his failed strategy in dealing with radical Islam

CNN:

On the fifth anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death, President Barack Obama sharply defended his targeted approached to fighting terror -- and said the next president would most likely follow his lead rather than his predecessor's.

"The kinds of Special Forces and intelligence-gathering that we saw in the bin Laden raid is going to be, more often than not, the tool of choice for a president in dealing with that kind of threat," he said.

"The ideology has not been extinguished," Obama acknowledged in an exclusive interview with CNN's Peter Bergen on Monday night. "The world is still dangerous. In many ways, the Middle East is in a more chaotic situation."

But -- without directly referring to President George W. Bush's decisions to send U.S. troops into Afghanistan and then Iraq -- Obama said such large-scale operations, which continue to reverberate in the current presidential race, would only make the fight against extremism harder.
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He is defending the indefensible.  His screw up by retreating from Iraq and trying to stand down in Afghanistan has allowed the enemy to grow and become more lethal and dangerous to the US and its allies.   Decapitation strikes have done little to deter the enemy and just using special ops raids is a recipe for an extended war that will be even bloodier than the one he decries.

The retreat from Iraq took the boot off the neck of ISIL and his incoherent policies in Syria and Libya gave radical Islam a more chaotic situation to exploit.

Following Obama's strategy would be a mistake.