By Kerby Anderson

Recently in an interview, Lt. Col. Allen West said that President Obama’s decision to ignore his generals was “probably the greatest military blunder the world will ever know.” Why did he say such a thing? One reason was the admission by the president at the last G-7 summit that the U.S. still lacks a “complete strategy” for training Iraqi troops to defeat ISIS.

To understand his criticism, we need to go back a few years to the recommendation by Army General Lloyd Austin. He was the operational commander on the ground and requested between 10,000 to 12,000 troops as a residual force. The president rejected that recommendation because of campaign promises and not on the reality on the ground. ISIS was able to exploit the situation since we left behind a power vacuum.

Col. West believes the president should admit his mistake and begin listening to his generals if the U.S. is to be successful in defeating ISIS. Moreover, we need to put diplomatic pressure on ISIS. We need a strategy to economically isolate ISIS. And we need a military strategy to defeat ISIS on the ground.

He says the president’s latest plan to sent 450 American troops to Iraq is “the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.” We are pretending to do something but aren’t really addressing the challenge of ISIS from the many fronts necessary to bring about its defeat. You can’t say we are disrupting ISIS when they hold daytime parades through Ramadi.

Col. West believes that we can defeat ISIS, but we can’t do it with half measures and no coherent strategy. He also reminds us that this is an ideological battle. We must also be able to defeat their propaganda. Recently on Point of View I talked with Dr. Sebastian Gorka (author of Defeating Jihad) about how America could do this.

We can defeat ISIS. What we need is a will and a way.