RUTHFULLY YOURS

If Obama were Dr. Jonas Salk, he would have spent the early 1950s crafting wheelchairs rather than curing polio.

Similarly missing the point, Obama wants to accept 100,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees who have washed up on Europe’s shores and thrown themselves on the mercy of Western civilization. European leaders this week developed quotas to distribute these distressed souls, likely including some terrorist infiltrators, across the Continent.

Alas, wheelchairs cannot kill viruses, and refugee camps cannot erase the root cause of this humanitarian catastrophe: ISIS and its mayhem in Syria and Iraq. Obama should lead the West in killing ISIS, so that these refugees can go home, and the countrymen they left behind need not dash madly across the Mediterranean.

#share#While ISIS actually chops heads and blasts villages, Obama still bears much blame for this bloodshed. Desperate to “end” rather than win the Iraq War, Obama yanked out all American troops, failing to leave behind a stabilization force of perhaps 10,000 GIs — much like those brave Americans in uniform who still help maintain the post–World War II peace in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Just as dirt rushes into a vacuum cleaner, ISIS raced into the void created when Obama prematurely withdrew from Iraq.

The ensuing battle against ISIS oscillates between the cosmetic and the inadequate.

“Obama mostly has stiffed the Kurdish Peshmerga on armored vehicles, weapons, and ammunition,” says J. D. Gordon, former Pentagon spokesman and executive director of Protect America Today. “Even though they are the most effective ground force fighting ISIS, the Iraqi government offers just a fraction of what Peshmerga needs. Baghdad worries that, post-ISIS, heavily armed Kurds will declare independence.”

ISIS fighters rolled into Ramadi, Iraq, last May 17. On a bright desert highway, they rode unchallenged in pickup trucks and triumphantly waved their black flags of death in broad daylight — far from civilians and potential collateral damage. With their two-ton Gatling guns firing 70 rounds per second, a few well-placed A-10 Warthog jets could have converted these scumbags into burger, never to bother anyone again. What a wasted opportunity.

Obama’s $500 million scheme to prepare 5,400 moderate Syrians to fight ISIS has yielded just 54 trainees. Most of these “1 percenters” already have been killed or captured or have quit, leaving “four or five” in combat, U.S. Central Command’s General Lloyd Austin conceded.

Pro-American Syrian leaders have waited as much as two weeks for the CIA to deliver weapons urgently needed for timely missions. According to the Wall Street Journal, one trusted free-Syrian commander requested 1,000 rifles and received fewer than three dozen. Another got the equivalent of 16 bullets per month per trainee. That’s one shot every other day.

Bill Gertz, the Washington Free Beacon’s veteran national-security correspondent, reports that the Pentagon has failed to bomb 60 ISIS terrorist camps across Iraq and Syria, for fear of inflicting civilian casualties. Meanwhile, Defense Intelligence Agency analysts complain that supervisors doctored their reports to make ISIS look weaker.

And now ISIS terrorists may be coming to a neighborhood near you, sprinkled among the boatloads of refugees whom Obama has invited to America.

“Just wait,” one self-proclaimed ISIS member told Buzzfeed, claiming that 4,000 jihadists already have surfed into Europe atop the refugee tsunami. “It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world . . . and we will have it soon, God willing.”

Remember: The Boston Marathon–bombing Tsarnaev brothers were Chechen refugees. Pakistani citizen Ramzi Yousef requested political asylum and soon masterminded the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

While most in today’s wave of refugees are peaceful, suddenly planting Muslims into a nation more focused on multiculturalism than assimilation will reap unintended consequences, short of jihad.

No wonder Obama’s “ISIS czar,” retired Marine Corps general John Allen, is departing. According to Bloomberg View’s Josh Rogin and Eli Lake, “U.S. officials familiar with Allen’s decision say he has been frustrated with White House micromanagement of the war and its failure to provide adequate resources to the fight.” The columnists add, “Allen also tried several times to convince the White House to agree to Turkish demands for a civilian protection zone in Syria, to no avail.”

“The Middle East is not part of the world that plays by Las Vegas rules: What happens in the Middle East is not going to stay in the Middle East,” former CIA director and retired general David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. He called Syria a “geopolitical Chernobyl – spewing instability and extremism over the region and the rest of the world.”

[Photo illustration: Deroy Murdock.]

Dr. Obama needs to cure the ISIS disease immediately, not just treat its tragic symptoms.

— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.