Secretary of Defense Ash Carter is not happy with the conduct of the war against ISIS, and he’s letting everyone know it. Last week he met with European defense officials and urged them to step it up. In the days ahead, he will convene a special meeting of coalition leaders specifically “to set expectations” for each nation.

Carter told CNBC recently that our coalition partners “can do more,” adding that “many of them are not doing enough or doing nothing at all.”

I’m sure there is a lot of truth to that statement, but the same criticism has been leveled against the Obama administration.

In August 2014 Obama said he didn’t have a strategy to defeat ISIS. Nearly a year later, the strategy was still incomplete. Meanwhile the “JV team” continued to run up the score, conquering more and more territory, committing more and more atrocities.

When the president finally made up his mind to take action, it was a half-hearted commitment at best. According to one analysis, Bill Clinton’s 1999 campaign against Serbia averaged 138 airstrikes per day. Obama’s strikes against ISIS averaged about seven strikes a day. A year later, they peaked at around 12-a-day, but then fell to three.

Clearly, the United States could do a lot more too. And while capability is likely an issue with many of our coalition partners, lack of will is the biggest problem holding us back.

The Useless U.N.

If you needed more evidence of the utter uselessness of the United Nations, you got it during Tuesday’s session of the U.N. Security Council. The session was supposed to discuss “The Situation In The Middle East.”

There is certainly a lot to talk about regarding the Middle East — the Syrian civil war, the genocide against Christians being committed by ISIS, Iran’s increasing aggression, the mass migration of Muslims now destabilizing Europe, etc.

Instead, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon used his time to launch into a tirade against Israel.

Adopting the language of Islamic terrorists, Ban Ki-moon suggested it was only natural that Palestinians are killing Israeli civilians, saying, “… it is human nature to react to occupation.” He went on to demand more concessions from Israel in pursuit of a two-state solution, and he blamed settlement activities — homes of Jews in Judea and Samaria — for much of the violence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shot back, saying the U.N. had “lost its neutrality and moral force.” Netanyahu said, “There is no justification for terrorism. The Palestinian terrorists don’t want to build a state; they want to destroy a state, and they say that proudly. They want to murder Jews everywhere and they state that proudly.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu is right. The Palestinians have rejected multiple Israeli peace offers. In fact, even the leader of Israel’s main opposition party now concedes that a two-state solution is unrealistic because of Palestinian terrorism.

Khamenei Does It Again

In yesterday’s report, I noted that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had previously denied the Holocaust. Well, he did it again [Wednesday] — on International Holocaust Remembrance Day!

In a video posted [Wednesday], the ayatollah blamed Israel — the “fake Zionist regime” as he put it — for the tremendous suffering in the Muslim world.

He then asked, “Who supports them? Who clears the road for them? Who stands behind them?” Answering his own question, the ayatollah states, “It is western powers — headed by America.”

Addressing the Holocaust, Khamenei said, “No one in European countries dares to speak about [the] Holocaust. While it is not clear whether the core of this matter is a reality or not, even if it is a reality, it is not clear how it happened.”

Khamenei’s video was ironically entitled, “Are The Dark Ages Over?” The title is ironic because it is Khamenei’s brand of radical Islam that is stuck in the dark ages and seeks to plunge the entire world into another dark age.