Jed Babbin, deputy undersecretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush, says President Barack Obama is giving the Islamic State much more legitimacy than it deserves by calling it ISIL rather than ISIS.
"The difference is pretty simple, and the president is quite wrong," Babbin, a contributing editor at The American Spectator, said Wednesady on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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"ISIS is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and ISIL is the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. 'The Levant' [is] an archaic term which . . . defines territory that ranges from Anatolia in Turkey all the way around the curve, the eastern Mediterranean, through Israel, and so forth all the way down to Egypt.
"So, when the president calls them ISIL, he's giving them a lot more credit and a lot more legitimacy than they deserve. So, I just really don't understand why he's doing that because, quite frankly, it's wrong."
Babbin says the president's motivation for calling the Islamic State ISIL is "more likely just simply his way of withdrawing America from the world stage."
"We used to be a superpower until Mr. Obama came in. We had the ability to affect world events . . . to protect allies . . . to tell enemies to not do what we didn't want them to do, and they wouldn't necessarily do it because they feared us.
"Now, well, you look everywhere from the South China Sea to Ukraine to the Middle East. We are not either respected or feared, and if you look at what [Russian President] Vladimir Putin is doing, if you look at what ISIS is doing, no one is really in a position of saying, well, Obama told us we shouldn't do it, so maybe we shouldn't do it."