With regard to ISIS, New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin deftly sums up the enduring cluelessness of our current president and his equally clueless administration. “The consequences of Obama’s fecklessness fall most heavily on Muslims, Christians and Kurds in Iraq and Syria. But it will not end there,” Goodwin explains. “Islamic State wants to attack America and, as its magazine says, ‘do something big, something that would make any past operation look like a squirrel shoot … something truly epic.’ Is that what it will take to wake Obama?”

The magazine to which Goodwin refers is Dabiq, which I have linked to here for two reasons: one, the quality and sophistication of this propaganda sheet should make it clear the only real “JV team” in this fight isn’t ISIS. It’s the Obama administration, whose eight month effort to “degrade and destroy” this bloodthirsty band of Islamist killers has done neither.

The second reason I linked to Dabiq has to do with an article written by British hostage John Cantlie, who has been held by ISIS for more than two years. The opening paragraph in “The Perfect Storm” neatly sums up the current threat. “The pledges of allegiance that are now being announced on a seemingly monthly basis from Islamic groups around the world to the Islamic State are exactly what every mujāhid prayed for and a nightmare scenario for the military and political leaders of the democratic world,” Cantlie writes. “The incredible growth of the Caliphate and the fact that it is a living, breathing entity with thousands of square miles of territory has given Muslims around the Middle East, Asia, and Africa the belief and confidence to take up arms, pledge their loyalty, and launch operations with a unity and strength of purpose that has simply not been seen before.”

And what does ISIS wish to do with that unity and strength of purpose? Goodwin alludes to the answer, but Cantlie provides the details — of how they would obtain a nuclear weapon and bring it into the United States.

Cantlie explains that ISIS has billions of dollars in the bank that they could use to purchase a nuclear device from corrupt officials in Pakistan. The weapon would then be transported to Libya, currently a jihadist wonderland, courtesy of Obama’s “leading from behind” strategy that ousted Muammar Gaddafi. The weapon could then be moved to Nigeria, where, as Cantlie explains, “drug shipments from Columbia bound for Europe pass through West Africa, so moving other types of contraband from East to West is just as possible.”

And once across the ocean, the rest has an excruciatingly familiar ring, one tied directly to the utter bankruptcy of Obama, Democrats and half of the GOP. “The nuke and accompanying mujāhidīn arrive on the shorelines of South America and are transported through the porous borders of Central America before arriving in Mexico and up to the border with the United States,” Cantlie hypothesizes. “From there it’s just a quick hop through a smuggling tunnel and hey presto, they’re mingling with another 12 million ‘illegal’ aliens in America with a nuclear bomb in the trunk of their car.”

Cantlie speculates that such a scenario might be “far-fetched” but insists it’s “infinitely more possible today than it was just one year ago.” He also explains a nuke is only one option. A few thousand tons of easy-to-make ammonium nitrate — the very same ingredient used by Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people — is another.

No doubt most people reading this will tend to focus on the likelihood of such a scenario occurring. That’s the wrong place to focus because it obscures the most obvious question: What is the Obama administration doing to prevent it from happening? In the eight months since the president made the aforementioned promise to degrade and destroy this JV team, ISIS’s territory has expanded. Obama’s reaction? “I don’t think we’re losing,” he told Atlantic magazine’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Obama also referred to last week’s fall of Ramadi as a “tactical setback,” despite the reality that vastly outnumbered ISIS fighters seized control when Iraqi security forces fled the city.

And once again, one of the dimmest women to ever hold a serious position in the federal government succinctly characterized the Orwellian level of denial embraced by this president and his administration. Following the Iraqi military’s capitulation in Ramadi, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf offered this gem to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last Wednesday:

“The Iraqi security forces have held their lines on the outside of the city.”

One day later, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest made sure Americans fully understood how phony the Obama administration’s degrade and destroy mission truly is. "The president is not going to be in a position where he’s going to consider a large-scale U.S. military deployment,“ Earnest declared.  "And I don’t think that (Republicans) will find either a lot of support on the part of the American people for a large-scale deployment of military resources to essentially re-invade Iraq or invade Syria.”

Probably not — until ISIS makes good on its “truly epic” intentions. In other words, some Americans will have to be killed before Obama wakes up.

How many? Is there any doubt this administration and its equally corrupt media allies would make every effort to minimize both the dimensions of such an attack along with the public outrage it would engender? And if it were established that the attackers did indeed enter the nation through our porous Southern border, wouldn’t there be an equally determined effort to assure us that border security is good, but not perfect, or that a “lack of funding” by a short-sighted GOP was the principal reason the border remains unsecured? Didn’t we just endure the exact same kind of disinformation campaign, courtesy of Democrats and their media allies who insisted Amtrak’s infrastructure — as opposed to an engineer running a train at twice the allowable speed limit — was to blame for the latest deadly crash?

And that’s the best part of the scenario. Remember, Cantlie has already charted the “incredible growth” of these bloodthirsty, worldwide Caliphate wannabes. Now add the steroid shot of a successful and devastating attack on American soil to the mix. Imagine the propaganda then. Imagine the explosion in recruitment then.

Do I get that most Americans are “tired of war?” Do I get that they’re exasperated by the reality that no one else, especially one feckless Middle East nation after another, is willing to pick up the slack against these butchers? Do I sense the isolationist fever in the air?

Yes, yes and yes.

Unfortunately, ISIS wants war with us. Moreover, while Obama touts a coalition of 50 nations he has assembled for the fight, only four have helped the United States with airstrikes, and many of the “passive” Arab nations point to Obama’s equally feckless courtship of Iran, one that enables their blatantly obvious regional aspirations, as the reason for that passiveness. What Americans need to decide is what level of Islamist metastasis they are willing to abide while they wait for the rest of the world to join the fight. While most Americans don’t want to hear it, there is a point where the determination to keep America from bearing the lion’s share of the battle becomes counter-productive.

Mushroom cloud counter-productive.

As for isolationism, it’s a fool’s errand to pursue without energy independence. Good luck selling energy independence to a president who not only killed the Keystone pipeline, he just told Coast Guard Academy graduates that global warming is an “immediate threat to our national security” and a phenomenon responsible for the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the civil war in Syria. Ordinarily, such moonbattery would be laughable. In light of ISIS, it reveals an underlying military strategy that reeks of ideologically inspired unpreparedness.

Furthermore, isolationism only works if we remain relatively isolated. Aside from the free-for-all at the border, Muslim emigration to the United States has doubled, from approximately 50,000 immigrants per year in 1992 to roughly 100,000 per annum today.

Cause and effect? Arab activists were outraged when a secret 2013 government document revealed that Dearborn, MI, with a population of less than 100,000 people, was second only to New York City and its 8 million inhabitants with regard to the number of known or suspected terrorists and their associates. National Review’s Ian Tuttle refers to the inevitable cries of Islamophobia that inevitably arise when one suggests a correlation between the number of Muslims and the increase of radicalization, but he notes the obvious. “Whatever the percentage of Muslims who support or would ever consider supporting jihadism, the raw number obviously increases along with the total number of Muslims,” he writes. “One percent of 10 million is much larger than 1 percent of 1 million. The questions is, at what point does the radical population achieve a kind of critical mass?”

How about when the nation is reeling from another devastating domestic attack that was eminently preventable — and the perception of our vulnerability has skyrocketed as a result?

“What is happening now is a pooling of skills and experience that poses the greatest danger the West has seen in modern times,” Cantlie warns. “When you have that amount of battle-hardened mujāhidīn all cooperating and exchanging information for the first time under one flag, the potential for operations on a previously unseen level rises exponentially.”

Regardless, it is virtually certain all of the above will be dismissed as either fear- or war-mongering. That’s the default position for the Obama administration, Democrats and the mainstream media. No doubt a considerable number of Americans agree. They are certainly entitled to do so, just as Obama is entitled to dismiss advice from his military commanders as he did when he removed American troops from Iraq, and his administration is entitled to continue downplaying the growing lethality of ISIS, even if it requires Orwellian efforts to do so.

And if there is a horrible price to pay for those choices? There will be a plethora of excuses and hand-wringing, as well as the usual dollop of America-bashing from the usual suspects. But no amount of double-talk will obscure one over-riding reality: Unlike 9/11, we’ve been given a well-publicized and ample warning of terrorist intentions. ISIS is the most lethal and well-funded terrorist organization in the history of the world.

We should treat them that way, before they show us exactly what they’re capable of.

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