Background: …well, read my friend and RedState colleague Aaron Gardner, who wrote on this subject himself (including stuff about the laptop mentioned below).  But specifically… Syrian rebels (against pretty much both Assad and ISIS these days) reportedly found a laptop and handed it off to Foreign Policy magazine.  Said laptop apparently turned out to have quite a number of alarming files in it.  How alarming?  Well, FP is calling it “The Laptop of Doom:”

The laptop’s contents turn out to be a treasure trove of documents that provide ideological justifications for jihadi organizations — and practical training on how to carry out the Islamic State’s deadly campaigns. They include videos of Osama bin Laden, manuals on how to make bombs, instructions for stealing cars, and lessons on how to use disguises in order to avoid getting arrested while traveling from one jihadi hot spot to another.

But after hours upon hours of scrolling through the documents, it became clear that the ISIS laptop contains more than the typical propaganda and instruction manuals used by jihadists. The documents also suggest that the laptop’s owner was teaching himself about the use of biological weaponry, in preparation for a potential attack that would have shocked the world.

The details of the materials quoted in that Foreign Policy article are sufficiently detailed that I’m not comfortable repeating them: you never know what foreign bad actors might be trolling this site for intel.  And if that bald statement doesn’t disturb you, nothing will.  Glenn Reynolds put our situation regarding ISIS quite bluntly: “Obama may not have a strategy, but they do.”  Fortunately for the country, there is a major political party that does think about this sort of thing; unfortunately, we’re not in the White House.

Yet.

While we’re on this subject, let me take this opportunity to note something.  Quite a few people on the Left are now reassessing their previous stance on the Iraq War, and I would like to believe that at least some of them are sincere about it.  But both those who are sincere, and those who are not, should be aware that they’d be well-suited to step back and let the grown-ups fix this particular mess.  We’ve already let this walking disaster of Barack Obama’s go on for too long as it is.

And no, the Once-and-Future-Antiwar-Left may not claim moral superiority in this matter, because they have none themselves and I have no interest in conceding any of mine.  You see, back in the far-off days of 2008, we had a situation in Iraq where terrorists did not take other people, enslave them, and gang-rape them in prison until it was time to sell the survivors to people who would rape them individually.  That was not happening then.  This is happening now.  And this is not a failure of Obama’s policies.  This is the inevitable result of those policies.  And the White House has its priorities:

“Is [Barack Obama] detached? Does he feel like the critics coming after him, it just doesn’t matter anymore?” [Fox News’ Ed] Henry asked. “Why is he still raising campaign money, playing golf, when he’s acknowledging he doesn’t have a strategy to deal with this?”

“The job of any U.S. president is to be able to handle a lot of different responsibilities at the same time,” Earnest replied, in defense of Obama’s fundraising and golfing. The secretary added that Obama has a national security team, to whom he has outsourced the job of looking after America’s national security challenges.

“One of his responsibilities as the head of the party is to support Democratic candidates who are on the ballot,” Earnest noted.

Free translation: Yeah, sure, the President feels bad that the pullout of Iraq that he set in motion turned out so bad.  But, hey: how much money do you think that a fifteen year old Yezidi girl in a sex prison can give to the Democratic National Committee, anyway? …And as you may have guessed, if that translation bothers you then take it up with someone who cares.

Moe Lane (crosspost)