Barack Obama is mistaken if he thinks the Islamic State and the Levant can be reduced to a “manageable problem.”

Yet that’s what the president of the United States said today in a news conference at the start of a NATO meeting in Estonia.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/mitch-mcconnell-isil-110566.html?hp=l4

Uh, Mr. President? ISIL needs to be destroyed. Wiped out. Eliminated. Obliterated. Exterminated.

I’m sure I can find some more active verbs here, but you get the point.

Should we go to war, as in a ground war, with troops, tanks and trucks? No. Air power, and lots of it, is needed here. We have it. We should use it.

ISIL has shown that it cannot be “managed.” It cannot be contained and made insignificant. It is a well-funded, well-armed, sophisticated, media savvy organization that must be dealt with in the harshest manner possible — with extreme prejudice.

I get why the president won’t commit to a ground war in Syria and/or Iraq to fight these monsters. We’ve installed a government in Iraq that now must defend itself. As for Syria, fighting ISIL house to house would in effect put us shoulder to shoulder with troops loyal to another bad seed, Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator who’s gassed his own people.

The president’s rhetoric, though, today took a startling turn toward the bland.

He’d declared the U.S. intention to destroy ISIL after it beheaded Stephen Sotloff. Today, he talked of reducing ISIL to a manageable size.

Destruction, Mr. President, is the only option.