Dithering away a grand opportunity because it doesn't fit with his worldview

John M. Ellis at The American Thinker points out that the main reason real victories in our war against jihad have been so elusive is that, until the advent of the IS caliphate, there was no real field of battle on which to squarely face them, but that now that is the case:

n late 2001, America faced a frustrating situation. An enemy had declared its intent to destroy us, and had struck a devastating first blow. We had the most powerful military in the world and could easily defeat any power on the battlefield, but this enemy didn’t form up as an army on a battlefield. Our wars have been against states, but this was not a state; it was a loose but extensive network of individuals spread across and hidden among the populations of many countries, including our own. The exasperating result was that while we had a powerful force to defend us, for the most part we couldn’t deploy it. We were able to invade Afghanistan to clean out a sanctuary there, but that was all.

Good intelligence might let us take out a few individuals from time to time, even one as important as Osama bin Laden, but no serious engagement on a field of battle seemed possible. If our enemy ever managed to kill tens of thousands of us by using poison gas in the New York subway, all thoughts would turn to a retaliatory counter-strike, but we would probably have no idea how or where to accomplish that.

If we keep our eyes on this wider context, we can see immediately that what is happening now in Iraq is an absolute game-changer. Our deadly enemy, radical Islam, has taken to the battlefield! At last, they are out in the open, fighting a conventional war as an army and a state. This is the opportunity we could only wish for during the last thirteen years. Jihadis from all over the world are pouring into Iraq to join them, leaving the cover of their surrounding civilian populations and forming up as an army. They are fighting on our terms, on the battlefield, where we are supreme. At last, after years of frustration, we have the chance to engage and crush them.

The hang-up is that the Most Equal Comrade sees his mission as extricating post-America from the ickiness that is Iraq.

Determined to avoid doing anything that could appear to undermine what he sees as his achievement, or worse yet look like an admission that he had been wrong, Obama lets his boasts shackle him. And yet there is a simple and convincing answer to all of his hesitation: he is seeing these events in the wrong context. This is about the long struggle between modern civilization and a cruel, barbarous force that wants to destroy it, not about George Bush’s Iraq war. It may be true that Obama¹s premature exit from Iraq led to what ISIS is now doing, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that a hitherto elusive enemy is suddenly out in the open on the battlefield.
Obama obviously senses that something is wrong with his stance, and so he commits air power to attack ISIS, all the while claiming that this is only for humanitarian reasons, or for protection of the few Americans who are in the area. And yet it’s clear that he hopes his limited moves will stop ISIS without having to admit that this was his real goal. But in so critical a situation we can't afford self-deception. It is in our national interest to destroy this first organized trans-national jihadi army, and that means bringing  all the resources that we have to the task immediately.

At this moment, there are sane, not to mention deeply alarmed, people in Washington trying to convince the MEC to do what is necessary.  This is a moment of real testing.  Is the guy so headstrong in his insistence that "getting out of Iraq" be his legacy that he'll squander the chance to put a stop to the peril that this nation is in?