No New Ideas for Fighting the Islamic State

Many people have noticed that while the leading Republicans love to criticize the Obama administration's policies in Syria and Iraq, they actually agree with him. From an article on Ted Cruz:

Given that Cruz believes America has “receded from the world stage” and is “increasingly viewed as irrelevant” under the Obama administration, which has pursued “a photo-op foreign policy of a bomb here and a missile there” rather than trying to defeat ISIS, you might expect that Cruz is promising a dramatically more aggressive policy to defeat the group. But the Cruz plan for taking on ISIS doesn’t differ dramatically from the airstrikes plus proxy war strategy the Obama administration is already pursuing to decidedly mixed effect.

As I noted at the time, Rand Paul explained this last year, writing in response to a belligerent Op-Ed from Rick Perry:

In fact, some of Perry’s solutions for the current chaos in Iraq aren’t much different from what I’ve proposed, something he fails to mention. His solutions also aren’t much different from President Barack Obama’s, something he also fails to mention. Because interestingly enough, there aren’t that many good choices right now in dealing with this situation in Iraq.

The only people who actually have different recommendations are Trump, who suggested we ally with Assad and the Russians, and Lindsay Graham, who wants to send in a large American ground force. Everyone else is advocating slight variations of what we are already doing.