President Barack Obama's baffling and conflicting statements about the Islamic State group (ISIS) are almost comical, says retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters.
"Obama's to the point now where he confuses himself. It was almost Monty Python-esque this morning to hear him contradict himself," Peters said Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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The commander in chief said Wednesday that the U.S. plans to "degrade and destroy" the Islamic State extremist group that is slaughtering Christians in the Middle East and recently beheaded two American journalists.
Later, he said an international coalition to fight ISIS could turn the terror group into "a manageable problem."
Those statements come just days after the president said, "We don't have a strategy yet" on fighting the Islamic State group.
"Many of our allies are just sitting on the bench because they're waiting for America to really lead, and Obama can talk all he wants about building an alliance against the Islamic State caliphate and hey, I'm all for a strong alliance, but our allies can't trust us," Peters said.
"It's like Lucy, Charlie Brown, and the football. Every time they trust us, we screw them over ... When you look at him from the viewpoint of our allies and prospective allies, they just can't trust the guy to live up to anything he says."
Peters — author of the bestselling Civil War novel,
"Hell or Richmond," published by Forge Books — said Vice President Joe Biden's vow to chase the Islamic State group to "the gates of hell" was fine, but had no teeth.
"You're going to chase them to the gates of hell? We won't even cross the Syrian border. As I can tell, the gates of hell are considerably south of that," he said.
"The rhetoric is fine. Biden said the right thing more or less, but it's about what we do. I did sense some tension in the administration where even high-level loyalists are trying to move Obama.
"He won't let anybody in the administration use the word 'war' ... because he was going to be the president that had no more wars. It's as if after Pearl Harbor we insisted we weren't in a war with the Japanese."
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