One of the more maddening aspects of Barack Obama’s policy toward ISIS is its conspicuous reluctance to label what it is doing to ethnic and religious minorities as genocide. By any definition, the mass killings, ethnic cleansing, sexual slavery, and the destruction of religious and cultural artifacts that the Islamic State is engaged in should be considered genocide as much as anything that the Nazis did. The House of Representatives has weighed in and has voted 393 to 0 to declare that what the terrorist army is going is, in fact, genocide.

Secretary of State John Kerry has been dithering for months over whether or not to issue a formal declaration that genocide is taking place in the Middle East.

He has a conundrum. If he decides that such as not happening, he will lose all credibility in Washington and on the world stage. But if Kerry does make the formal declaration, the United States will be under the obligation, under United National treaty, to do certain things that the Obama administration has demonstrated a reluctance to do, including hunting down and prosecuting those in ISIS who are responsible and even resorting to military intervention to stop the atrocities.

Apparently the Obama administration would prefer to run out the clock and leave the problem of ISIS and the genocide it is committing to the next president to wrestle with. The attitude is fraught with a great deal of cravenness and a reluctance to face responsibility for the administration’s actions.

It was, after all, the zeal with which the Obama administration closed out America’s role in Iraq, started with the 2003 invasion, that led to the rise of ISIS to begin with. Ever since, President Obama has been in denial about the threat posed by that terrorist state within a state, at one time even sneering that it was “the JV team.”

The “JV team” has proven not only the ability to commit biblical level outrages in the Middle East but to exert its awful influence worldwide, as the people of Paris and San Bernardino, California found out to its cost.

The response of the Obama administration has been, to put it mildly, tepid at best. It clearly hopes that no policy at all is the best way to deal with the problem.