Making excuses for Islam seems to have become a norm after the Muslim/Arab attack against New York City in 2001. The apologetics started when George Bush allowed a chartered planeload of Saudis to flee the country before the smoke had cleared over ground zero. The Obama national security team, the academy, and especially the media, still labor mightily to separate Muslim acts and ideology.

In the Obama years, the twin vectors of rhetorical appeasement (John Brennan) and “humanitarian” intervention (Samantha Power) merged to create a kind of democratic imperialism, a foreign policy paradigm where regime change is the agent and democracy is the expected, yet improbable, outcome. The Obama crew does not admit any evidence, even beheadings, which might suggest that Islam and democracy are incompatible.

At the same time, Islamists thrive globally in pursuit of religious monoculture. In the past decade, passive American rhetoric and imprudent interventions have actually enabled theocracy, undermined sovereignty, and discredited democracy worldwide.

The global village, especially the Muslim street, is now littered with the nation/state chaos of wishful thinking. Iran, Libya, Egypt, the Sudan, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are among the casualties. Intervention in the Ummah, in the name of “stability” or democracy has become a serial farce.

A fresh crop of theo-fascist thugs is now abroad, varieties that make Fatah, Hezb’allah, Hamas, or al Qaeda seem enlightened. The new face of Islam is savage:  beheading, crucifixion, slavery, and genocide. Demands are binary: “accept Islam or die.” The mad dogs of Muslim hell are off the choke chain.

The standard bearer of Islam’s latest lurch backwards is the newly minted Islamic State of Iran and Syria (ISIS). Muslim terrorists have upped the ante and called America’s bluff again. Unlike the imaginary red lines drawn in the Oval Office, ISIS has drawn a bright red line with American blood.

The cradle of civilization has become a charnel house, a manufactured tragedy wrought by the intersection of pandering, strategic naiveté, and blowback. Administration and Media sycophants were inclined to ignore beheadings in Mosul when the victims were natives. Now that the Islamic knife cuts closer to home, decapitation is finally covered above the fold.

Such developments might sound grim, but apparently not bad enough to interrupt administration partying on Martha’s Vineyard this summer.

When President Obama first spoke of ISIS, he referred to the caliphate as the “junior varsity.” Presumably the varsity might be James Clapper’s cryptic “nefarious characters.” Dismissing real threats with trite euphemism says everything about the professionalism of the Obama national security team.

Take just Syria as an example. America partnered first with anti-Assad Islamists, some of which are now part of or fighting with ISIS. Washington now finds itself both supplying and killing the same fanatics that are trying to depose the Syrian and Iraqi regimes. In fact, Obama intervened in Syria to undo a regime which now appears to have morphed into another ally of the moment. Who could trust America in such a matrix?

Now that children and American journalists are subject to public beheading by ISIS, someone needs to ask the President of the United States if the conflict in Iraq is still a “war of choice.” If the war in Iraq/Syria is now “necessary,” the outlook is bleak. The future is dark because leadership in the White House is so clearly insufficient for the challenges that lay ahead.

When Mister Obama spoke of James Foley’s recent confession and execution, the president forgot to mention that the executioner was an Englishman. Yes, the man who severed Foley’s head was probably a Brit, one of many jihadis that America and the EU have allowed, if not sponsored, in the Levant under “regime change” policies. How does America and Europe lie with dogs and not get fleas?

Poetic, if not historical, justice would be served if the shotgun marriage of Syria and Iraq is remembered as the Obama Caliphate.

America appeasing the so-called “moderate” Muslim majority, in places like Doha, Riyadh, and Islamabad at the expense of enabling religious war, the global jihad, was always a recipe for disaster. Now the coercive knife of Islam even threatens Western media apologists, the kind of Islamic blowback that only morons or masochists would fail to anticipate.

“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.” – George Orwell

G Murphy Donovan is a former Intelligence officer who writes about the politics of national security.