At this writing, terrorist attacks in two Brussels subway stations and the Brussels airport early Tuesday have left 31 people dead and 136 people injured. These attacks are horrible, as were the attacks in Paris, London, Boston, Benghazi, Jerusalem, New York, Washington D.C., etc, etc.
Making those attacks even more tragic is that in most places, especially in the United States we have not done what is necessary to protect ourselves from these terrorists. The failure is not in the military or police heroes trying to protect us, nor is it in the intelligence people trying learn about the attacks before they happen. The number one reason we are vulnerable is our political leaders who refuse to do what is necessary.
Their failure involves four areas:
- Identify the enemy
- Time to Profile
- Control the borders
- Fight all terrorists everywhere
Beginning today we will be exploring each failure in depth, one topic per day.
Identify The Enemy:
Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy, but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.”
Sun Tzu wrote those words 2,500 years ago in his book,”Master Sun’s Rules of Warfare,” (also known as “The Art of War.”)
Those words were very prophetic because Western leaders refuse to identify the enemy. Call it Political Islam or Radical Islam, it doesn’t matter. But pick something describing what it is, a religion that turned into a political movement. Of course it is not all Muslims, but it is a political movement that started in Islam, and they want to rule the world. And allow me to suggest that it is this silly game of political correctness preventing us from identifying the enemy is allowing the cancer of radical Islam to metastasize and spread terrorism throughout the world.
Along with the dangers of the actual terror attacks, the western nations, especially in the United States there is in force a radical political correctness which kills. It doesn’t kill with guns or bombs, but by ignoring the enemy, thus leaving us nakedly vulnerable for their violent attacks. The threat of being labeled an Islamophobe by the P.C. police is increasing the threat of being blown up by radical Islamists.
Our tepid response to terrorism projects America as weak and has done more to recruit people to radical Islam than any radical Imam’s Friday sermon, or ISIS website. People like to associate with winners and whether true or not, political Islam looks like a winner and the West (including America) looks like the losers.
The only way to defeat radical Islam is to identify them as our enemy and then crush them militarily. Anything short of that allows groups like ISIS to recruit supporters by claiming victory over the west.
A leader should never send people into battle without enough tools to win, but that is what our President is doing with his half hearted attempt to defeat the ISIS threat. Sending our special ops heroes over to Syria to fight ISIS does little more than put those special forces in danger. Even where we have masses of troops, the rules of engagement prevent our heroes from doing the job they have proven over and over they can do. Even our bombing runs are tepid. Through Nov. 2015, the first 15 months of the ISIS campaign the U.S. dropped an average of about 1,300 bombs/missiles a month (about 20k Total). During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. hit Sadaam’s forces with over 29,000 bombs/missiles the first month! If we want to prevent more attacks like what happened in Brussels or prevent our planes from being blown out of the sky like the Russian plane over the Sinai, the United States needs to crush and destroy ISIS and any other radical Islamist movement. And we need to mean it!
Our leaders have not shown a will to win. The U.S. has to change the rules of engagement allowing our people to fight. And sadly there are going to be civilian casualties. ISIS and other Islamic terror groups embed themselves among the civilian population. We must understand that the most humane way to conduct this war on terror is to fight it with a large force, with extreme power and end it as soon as possible. Absolutely we need to avoid civilian casualties as much as humanly possible, but we need to trust our military leaders, remove their handcuffs and tell them to win this war.
Our terrorist radical Islamic adversaries are joyfully celebrating that Obama, the liberal/ progressives, and the libertarians like Rand Paul voluntarily throw away America’s military strength by denying and handcuffing. This allows the radical Islamic terrorists attack our western allies and the American homeland.
Talk is nice but this is not a battle that can be won by negotiation—negotiation can only happen after we have won militarily. Does anybody really believe that Anwar Sadat would have gone to Jerusalem to make peace if Egypt hadn’t lost wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973?
For those who will ask, “why do we always have to be the world’s policemen?” The answer is of course not! But this isn’t “their fight,” it’s ours. If we allow ISIS and other Islamist groups to exist and expand we will once again be mourning the dead in our U.S. cities the same way the people of Belgium are mourning their dead today.
Another important lesson from Paris is that we need to seal our borders. Sealing our borders is not just a matter of keeping out illegal immigrants, more concerning is we need to keep out radical Islamists. Yes, folks, as easily as it is for a Mexican to cross the border into the southern U.S., it is just as easy for a radical Islamist to cross. It’s been long reported that Hezbollah is using the same southern narcotics routes that Mexican drug kingpins do to smuggle drugs and people into the United States, reaping money to finance its operations and threatening U.S. national security. The only way to stop them is to prevent them from entering the country.
For decades’ terrorists have been feeding at the teat of western government. They cynically support the “political wing” of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Fatah, acting as if they had no connection with the military wing. And the West refuses to call the terrorists what they are, Muslims who have taken the most extreme parts of their religion and turned it into a political movement. It’s just a semantics subterfuge– dangerous claptrap allowing governments to seemingly support “good behavior” while they are only denying the truth. Here in the United States groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, such as CAIR and the MSA are treated as legitimate human rights groups. And of course our president’s has consummated his love affair with the terrorist supporting regime of Iran, with a nuclear deal that ties the hands of the west but not Iran.
Until the West identifies the enemy, and begins to act like radical, or political Islam is the enemy, we have no chance of winning. In the end we may not identify them, but they sure identify us.
Tomorrow we will discuss profiling, something we must begin to do, something we can’t do without identifying the enemy.
