Since hearing the news last evening, my mind has been monopolized by thoughts of the tragic journalist
Steven Sotloff’s family.
It has been like imagining what life was like in the 15th century. I have no idea.
Nor can I begin to grasp the insoluble inconsolation that the grieving Sotloff family is experiencing this morning.
When Daniel Pearl suffered a similar Caveman Era ending on Feb. 1, 2002, the still-new President Bush pledged revenge and got it.
Days after the televised beheading of another Yankee journalist, James Foley, President Obama last evening interrupted his latest trip abroad to say that the United States will not forget “the terrible crime against these two fine young men.”
You don’t have to dial the home of Mr. Sotloff’s family to understand how remarkably uncomforting these hollow words make them feel.
Preferring an amorphous pillow-soft approach, Mr. Obama said that by golly, as soon as he or someone he deputizes can convince a circle of likeminded allies – unnamed – to join them, by golly they will sit down at a neutral site, as soon as they can agree on one, and by golly start to design a strategy that, by golly, he hopes will “degrade and destroy” the killers of ISIS.
He said that he could not define more clearly what he means because, by golly, a plan has not yet begun to be formed.
Soon as he does have a strategy in mind, Mr. Obama said, he will get back to the American people.
Sources said that Mr. Obama’s extremely tentative provisional plans for excuse-me revenge – a term he declined to use – did not convince ISIS leaders to forsake their mission to conquer the Western world.
