Wake Up, Mr. President

At WSJ:

President Obama on Sunday promised to “redouble” U.S. efforts against Islamic State, which shows he isn’t deaf to the political impact of Friday’s murderous assault in Paris. But why should anyone believe him? After years of dismissing the rising terror threat, Mr. Obama needs an epiphany if he doesn’t want to be remembered as the President who allowed radical Islam to spread and prosper.

“It is an act of war that was waged by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, by Daesh [the Arab name for Islamic State], against France,” said French President François Hollande on Saturday, in words that met the moment. Contrast that to Mr. Obama, who on Friday morning told ABC News that “we have contained” Islamic State. Some are saying Mr. Obama is guilty of bad timing, but the truth is worse: The remark is what he believes, or at least what he has wanted Americans to believe.

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The Paris massacre should mark the end of that self-deception. Jimmy Carter shed his illusions about the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and Mr. Obama needs a comparable rendezvous with reality. This will be harder for Mr. Obama, a man of great ideological vanity, but perhaps the prospect of defeat for his party in 2016 will force him to see the world more clearly.

For seven years Mr. Obama has used the unpopularity of the Iraq war as a shield for his retreat from antiterror leadership and the Middle East. His periodic drone strikes and his most notable security success, the Osama bin Laden raid, obscured the jihadist danger growing in the wake of America’s departure from Iraq and abdication in Syria.

Mr. Obama also deposed Moammar Gadhafi in Libya but then did almost nothing to help Libyans restore order. Americans saw a glimpse of the gathering storm in the terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, but the White House blamed it on an obscure video.

Now Americans can see clearly the spreading infection from Islamic State and a resurgent al Qaeda. It isn’t merely a regional threat, as Mr. Obama once claimed. Its offshoots have spread into North Africa across the Middle East to Afghanistan. The civil war in Syria has spawned a refugee crisis that has descended on Europe and may have provided cover for at least one of the Paris jihadists.

Islamic State also isn’t the “jayvee” terror team, as Mr. Obama once claimed...

Keep reading.

And flashback, "The World Will Blame President Obama If Iraq Falls."