Monday, September 26, 2011

Obama The Terror Warrior

Following Barack Obama's UN speechifying about Palestinians and other terrorists, it is probably an appropriate time to revisit the Obama administration's alleged counter-terrorism policy. To summarize it, he doesn't have one. Like J. Edgar Hoover refusing to recognize the existence of the Mafia and organized crime, Obama thinks in terms of individual criminals and criminal acts.

It's easier and more comfortable to think of using the vast resources of American law enforcement and the military to track down one high-profile international criminal like Osama bin Laden than it is to think in terms of using those same resources to break the back of organized terrorists or fight a war against jihadism. It's easier and more comfortable to pat oneself on the back for having captured or killed a single criminal than it is to recognize the need for 24/7 vigilance in fighting a huge multi-national amorphous yet hydra-headed enemy.

Like the Lernean Hydra, when you chop off the bin Laden head, others grow to replace it. The entire beast must be killed and the stumps of its heads seared with fire before a victory can be claimed. And since Obama is no Hercules, and "victory" has become a dirty word, his counter-terrorism program is the same old liberal war-on-crime model with an added twist. The twist is that Obama admits that he and his cadres of law enforcement are incapable of going it alone. So the solution is to "energize the strength of communities, to enhance the understanding of the threat posed by violent extremism."

I've touched on Obama's August formal report to the American people in the past, but after his UN moral equivalency speech and the hackneyed "walk in the other's shoes" admonitions to Israel and the Palestinians, it's probably a good idea to do a little more analysis. Obama's counter-terrorism policy is simply more feel-good, one-nation-under-therapy, liberal utopian silliness. The title of the the report alone is a strong hint of just how unserious he is about domestic terrorism. "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States." If you are empowered, he and his resources can be used for more important things.

"Empowering" is a liberal concept that actually means very little. Essentially, it's giving pretend power to people too timid or too lazy to do things on their own initiative. It makes them feel better about themselves, and is in reality just another facet of the self-esteem movement. If you have to be told that it's a good idea to report "suspicious activity," you're probably too ignorant to get it right.

But the real problem with the report and Obama's entire counter-terrorism policy is that he carries on George Bush's inability or unwillingness to identify the enemy we need to be fighting. "Terror" is a concept, but it can't be an enemy since it exists only in the mind. Wars are fought against real, physical, human enemies. And if you can't identify them, you are taking shots in the dark. But Bush and Obama both refuse to name the enemy for fear of being politically-incorrect and/or wounding the feelings of those actually making war on America, Israel and the entire civilized world.

We are not in the middle of the war on crime, or the war on disease, or the war on poverty, or the war on any other euphemism. We are in the middle of a war--period. Like the Cold War, there are occasional hot outbreaks (such as 9-11), but mostly the enemy is fighting small actions in multiple locations while planning and organizing for the next big strike. Since 9-11, there have been 23,000 terror attacks in the world. So far, America has suffered few but awful attacks since 9-11. The Fort Hood massacre is the most infamous of them.

Multi-culturalism, leftism, one-worldism, moral relativism, blind secularism, and stealth jihadism are the fellow-travelers and enablers of the enemy, but they are not the enemy. Militant Islam is the enemy, and our government refuses to admit that simple fact. To prove that, here is the list of naughty persons in the report that the Obamists want you to look out for: "Neo-Nazis, environmental extremists, anti-tax groups, militias, racial supremacists, and religious zealots." But when it comes to religious zealots, the biggest and most violent of those groups is not identified by name. In fact, isolated radical fundamentalist Christians are treated as if they are as numerous, as determined and as organized as radical fundamentalist Muslims.

Though there are scattered mentions of radicalized Muslims, the report never uses the words Islamism, jihadism, or any other expression which might identify fundamentalist Islam as the most dangerous, most active, and most violent group of all--dwarfing all the others combined. Another interesting thing about the report is that is purports to be a counter-terrorism document, but the words "terror" and "terrorism" do not exist anywhere in the document.

Instead, the harshest description, and the closest to being accurate, is "violent extremism." No mention of the fact that the "violent extremists" who brought down the World Trade Center buildings, the shoe-bomber, the Christmas Bomber, the Times Square Bomber, and the Ford Hood shooter, among many others, all share one violent belief in common--Islamism. Most of the planned attacks were thwarted, usually at the last minute by observant civilians. Each of those civilians was empowered by his or her own inner strength, not by a worthless government report and some feel-good words. The same can be said of those brave passengers who rushed the Islamists aboard Flight 93 and prevented a fourth jumbo jet hit on America on 9-11.

The one "violent extremist" Muslim organization mentioned by name in the report is Al Qaeda. That gave Obama a temporary victory when he took credit for killing the head of that organization. But the report fails to take note of Wahhabi mosques and schools nationwide, of the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat ul-Fuqra, Hizb ut-Tharir, Hamas, Hezbollah, or any other Islamist group with tentacles spread throughout America. It doesn't even come close to mentioning domestic terrorist-supporting groups posing as peacemakers such as unindicted Holy Land Foundation co-conspirator CAIR.

Quotes from persons intimately involved with terrorism have some telling things to say about the report specifically and Obama's lackadaisical approach to the problem of Islamism generally. Melvin Bledsoe is the distraught father of Carlos Bledsoe, a Muslim convert who murdered a soldier at a military-recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas. His comment on the report was that "It's never going to fix the problem when they're dancing around the issues." Islamists are recruiting faster than the military. Ed Husain, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations said that the report said "worryingly little and was primarily designed not to offend Muslims."

Barack Obama, as President and Commander-in-Chief is charged with a major constitutional obligation--to protect the citizens of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. He is not charged with being America's chief investigator of crime. Nor is he charged with being America's chief soother of injured feelings. He is charged with leading America when the nation is at war.

Obama has failed even to identify the enemy, and when he actually takes military action against Muslims of any sort overseas, he does so in what Shepard Smith of Fox News calls "not-wars." Worst of all, the American Commander-in-Chief is ready, willing and able to subvert American sovereignty, cripple American military power, and subordinate American leadership to part-time warriors like NATO and worthless warriors like the United Nations.

Obama can't blame the report on others. It was issued over his signature, and presented to the public as if it were holy writ. I suggest that he change the title to "Whistling Past the Graveyard."

16 comments:

Tennessee Jed said...

but hawk; . . . wait . . . I thought "Obama got Osama" Oh yeah, that's right, it was the SEALS. I found the notion of Obama and "warrior" to be, well, contradictory.

AndrewPrice said...

But he did kill Osama bin Laden, and that's all that counts, right? At least, that's how MSNBC sees it.

DCAlleyKat said...

Looking a human being in the eye and pulling the trigger ~ that's bravery, that's guts. The ability to pick up a ball point pen and sign a piece of paper like President Clueless did - well, so what! I have no doubt that he couldn't have picked up a firearm and done the deed himself. Hats off to the SEALS, and pass a disposable diaper to BHO!

Notawonk said...

law: when i read this part:
"Obama has failed even to identify the enemy..." I immedietly thought, nuh-uh, he HAS identified the enemy: it's us.

Unknown said...

Tennessee: I see him as more of the type who would rat on his criminal colleagues than one who would take on a dangerous criminal. He's not even an armchair warrior.

Unknown said...

Andrew: He was horrified to find out bin Laden had actually been killed. He thought it was a video game and they were playing Grand Theft Auto.

Unknown said...

DCAlleyKat: He's a petty thief, or a purse-snatcher. You're so right that he could never face a terrorist and pull the trigger. The most dangerous thing he's ever done is use a five iron to sink a long putt.

Unknown said...

Patti: Which is really problematic, since "we're the ones we've been waiting for," at least according to The One during the last campaign.

Writer X said...

Obama's speech at the UN was so uninspiring and nonsensical that I could barely watch it. Maybe if it had been a campaign fundraiser he would have brought his A-game?

Unknown said...

Writer X: You missed just how important that speech was to him. It wasn't a campaign speech for the Presidency, it was a campaign speech for election as UN Secretary-General. He blew it on both counts. LOL

T-Rav said...

LawHawk, I'm of two minds on the "cut the head off the snake" strategy. On the one hand, it's not effective unless combined with other methods; on the other, it can under the right circumstances yield results. I like to think of the Civil War; much of the damage done to the Confederate armies stemmed from their most able leaders, such as Stonewall Jackson, being killed off and replaced with less able men who kept getting their troops into bad situations. There were still enough men to get the job done, but they no longer had the proper leadership. So picking off men like bin Laden does have its advantages.

Of course, this is somewhat irrelevant to the main point, which is that we have a President who thinks in terms of moral relativism and law enforcement (actually, I don't even know about the latter) rather than winning a war. Which is what's really hamstringing us.

Unknown said...

T-Rav: There is undoubted importance in killing the other side's war leaders, but it is certainly not the only thing that needs to be done. An enemy which is not utterly defeated is just an enemy regrouping.

You can attempt to try them one at a time after each atrocity, or you can stamp out their home bases, and kill them en masse until there are too few to regroup. The former is slow suicide, the latter is an option our so-called leaders simply refuse to contemplate. The former is the "war on crime model," the latter is the recipe for victory. Obama opts for the former, and others are terrified of attempting the latter. The plan of both the Obama and Bush administrations has been to make surgical strikes while negotiating and attempting to turn barbarians into modern democrats.

Meantime, Islamist hostility jells and grows throughout the Middle East in preparation for the blood-bath we refuse to recognize is inevitably coming. Their power increases as the West demonstrates its weakness and unwillingness to face real war with an identifiable enemy.

StanH said...

It’s beyond Barry to lead in any way with anything. Bush made a mistake with that as well, we are at war with Islamo-Fascist whether we like it or not, and no writ from Himself (Barry) is gonna change that. We are cruising for a sucker punch, for now thankfully he’s kept most of Bush’s policies as regards to the fight against the Fascist…I don’t like to use the War on Terror, terror is a tactic. But as the election of 2012 draws perilously near, I look for Barry to do something that exposes us to danger to appease nitwits like Michael Moore, in a failed attempt to save his political ass.

Unknown said...

Stan: Obama simply has no leadership skills at all. That's a very dangerous thing for a Commander-in-Chief at war. At the moment, his far left base is about all he has left, so like you, I'm afraid he's going to do something really stupid to placate them and bring them back into the fold.

Joel Farnham said...

LawHawk,

Until Islam itself is identified with terrorism, we will always have it defined as extremists only are creating acts of terror. If Islam is associated with terrorism every where, then you will get the so-called "Islamic Moderates" changing their religion. Until then, we will have constant flare-ups.

Seriously, this seventh century religion needs to stay back in history with the various Caesers and crusades. It isn't for the modern world.

Unknown said...

Joel: All of the other "extremists" are perfectly suited for being handled with the "war on crime" model. They are, in fact, criminals. Mostly local, with a few interstate criminal enterprises. We are not at war with them. Armies fight wars, police fight crime.

The one glaring exception is radical Islam. It's local, it's state, and it's international with heavy funding coming from foreign powers (even some of our so-called allies). We are at war with those organizations, and we are still treating millions upon millions of people who want us wiped off the face of the earth as if they were the Crips and the Bloods.


Why the incompetents in DC can't see that clear distinction is beyond me. That's why "the war on terrorism" is such a complete failure. Murderous criminals can indeed commit acts which can be described as "terror," but their goal is profit, or revenge against another gang, or simply the joy of horrifying civil society. The goal of radical Islam goes far, far beyond that, and comes at us from both inside and outside the United States. That's war, not crime.

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