Recently, Obama made it clear that he and his administration have no strategy for dealing with ISIS. Anyone who’s been paying attention could have told you that. But it was nice for Obama to make it explicit:

[Obama’s] remarks came after days of heated debate inside the top levels of his own national security bureaucracy about how, where, and whether to strike ISIS in Syria. But those deliberations—which included a bleak intelligence assessment of America’s potential allies in Syria—failed to produce a consensus battle plan. And so Obama, who has long been reluctant to enter into the Syrian conflict, told reporters Thursday that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for confronting ISIS on a regional level.

That’s just fantastic news, right? ISIS is making grand strides in the Middle East, possibly planning strikes on American soil, and killing every infidel they find. It’s best at times like these to have an indecisive waffler on your side, don’t you think?

Part of the problem here is that every strategy for dealing with ISIS (and the whole Middle Eastern problem for that matter) has failed. We bomb them, they post pictures of dead civilians and more than replace their dead with new recruits. We try to leave, and they start killing everybody and taking over.

It was likely an error to ever get involved in the Middle East in the first place. It’s likely that Al Qaida, ISIS, and Hamas never would have gained any level of influence if we hadn’t attempted to preempt their fire with fire.

And now the consequences of our initial intervention necessitate continued intervention. Or we can leave and let the ISIS chips fall where they may. Either way, things are going to be ugly. No wonder Obama doesn’t have a plan.