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« on: August 17, 2013, 05:13:41 PM » |
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The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 8-15-2013
From The Federalist Patriot
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Memo to CinC: The Jihadis Are Alive and Well
Obama's Strategy Promotes Terrorist Attack
By Mark Alexander
August 15, 2013
"A universal peace ... is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts." --James Madison (1792)
According to Adm. Mike Mullen, Barack Obama's former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "The single, biggest threat to our national security is our debt." Indeed, the "Obama debt bomb1" dropped on America will inevitably lead to insolvency, unless there is a resurgence of the economy or inflation, or both, which might devalue that debt and defuse the bomb. (Of course, Obama never mentions that threat in his unending campaign to tax and spend2 the nation into bankruptcy.)
But there is another perilous hazard, which has been and remains more immediate than the national debt threat.
As his approval ratings continue to sink, Obama seeks to maintain the allegiance of his green peacenik core constituency by trumpeting his ordered withdrawal from Iraq and his pending ordered withdrawal from Afghanistan. He justifies these withdrawals by asserting that the risk of Islamic terrorism is greatly diminished, though clearly, as soon as we withdrew from Iraq, terror networks sprouted again.
In a high-profile May speech3 at the National Defense University, Obama framed his perception of the war against terrorism, saying, "This war, like all wars, must end."
"Al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to defeat," he insisted. "Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us."
This assertion is a continuation of a recurring political theme from his 2012 re-election campaign, when Obama said, "Working with Joe Biden and our national security team, we've been able to decimate al-Qa'ida. ... Al-Qa'ida has been decimated, Osama bin Laden is dead." (Of course, that same cynical campaign theme was precisely why his administration's political operatives changed the narrative talking points about the Benghazi attack4.)
However, despite his false and repetitive contentions that al-Qa'ida was on its heals, on the ropes, in retreat and decimated, Obama qualified those assertions in his NDU speech, noting, "What we've seen is the emergence of various al-Qa'ida affiliates. From Yemen to Iraq, from Somalia to North Africa, the threat today is more diffuse, with al-Qa'ida's affiliates in the Arabian Peninsula -- AQAP -- the most active in plotting against our homeland."
So now the administration is differentiating between "al-Qa'ida core," which was and remains a network of terrorist organizations and cells linked primarily by an ideological Islamist script, versus "al-Qa'ida affiliates," which are a network of terrorist organizations and cells linked primarily by an ideological Islamist script.
This parsing should be filed under "distinctions without a difference."
For the record, killing Islamist Sheik Osama bin Laden was about justice; it did little or nothing to end the increasing threat of Islamic terrorism. Granted, it was a terrorist cell under Osama's direction that perpetrated the 9/11 attack on our nation5, but the Islamofascist threat is far wider and deeper than al-Qa'ida or al-Qa'ida affiliates, and has grown steadily under Obama's watch.
The "affiliation" between Muslim terrorist groups is based on a pervasive Islamist ideology, and misunderstanding that connection is lethal.
Fortunately, regardless of how Obama tries to downplay that threat and our war to contain it, our national defense and intelligence leaders and organizations currently remain focused on those Islamist threat vectors, and our efforts to exterminate them have not diminished.
But what may soon alter that focus is Obama's mandate that terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens and facilities, whether at home or abroad, are to be treated as "criminal acts." This accounts for why the Obama administration refuses to condemned the slaughter of American soldiers at Ft. Hood by Islamist Nidal Hasan as a "terrorist act," opting instead to classify that incident as "workplace violence." And this policy shift was made clear with a recent Obama administration "leak" concerning "sealed indictments" issued for the perpetrators of the Benghazi attack. That, combined with deep military cuts, will inevitably undermine our "war on terror" ops tempo.
If Obama's policy shift sounds familiar, recall if you will that treating terrorism as a criminal act was the same policy position that the Clinton administration embraced, and that paved the way for the 9/11 attack.
After the twin 1998 al-Qa'ida bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Sudanese government twice offered Osama to the United States, but the Clinton administration declined, citing a lack of evidence to prosecute him.
By 2001, the U.S. military was severely downsized, and the Justice Department and CIA operated under very restrictive Clinton budgets and mandates. In other words, our offensive and defensive capabilities were weaker than at any time since the Carter administration.
Clinton's final national security policy directive in December 2000 didn't mention "al-Qa'ida" even once in its 45,000-word text. That directive laid bare the Clinton administration's "strategy" of swatting flies -- of lobbing the occasional cruise missile toward an empty tent and of treating terrorists as mere "fugitives" who should be extradited to "answer for their crimes." |
