The Patriot Post® · State Dept. Admits Obama's Anti-Terror Polices Failed

This just in from Barack Obama’s never-ending victory lap in the Long War: The State Department issued a notable report Friday indicating that terrorism is on the upswing around the world. Not only that, but Iran has a big hand in it. Clearly, Obama’s boasting in his own successful policies has been, to put it charitably, misplaced.

According to the State Department’s report, terror attacks spiked 35% between 2013 and 2014, while deaths from those attacks rose by a staggering 81%. State called the 2014 attacks “exceptionally lethal,” as 20 of them resulted in more than 100 deaths. Twenty-four Americans were among the nearly 33,000 victims of almost 13,500 attacks.

A major facet of the increase in attacks is that the Islamic State — previously known as the “JV team” — has, according to The Guardian, crippled al-Qaida from within while succeeding in procuring what State’s report called an “unprecedented seizure” of territory in Iraq and Syria. The report found, “The prominence of the threat once posed by core al Qaeda diminished in 2014. … AQ leadership also appeared to lose momentum as the self-styled leader of a global movement in the face of ISIL’s rapid expansion and proclamation of a Caliphate.”

Obama may claim to have “decimated” al-Qaida, but he has done so only by permitting the Islamic State to do it for him. That’s hardly what we’d call a model for success.

Much of the terrorism increase has happened in Iraq, where the Islamic State filled the vacuum left by Obama’s premature withdrawal of American forces. But Syria is also a serious problem, where the report notes that the number of foreign fighters swelling the ranks of the Islamic State “exceeded the rate of foreign fighters who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia at any point in the last 20 years.”

Finally, and perhaps of most concern going forward, is that the State Department acknowledges Iran’s major role in sponsoring the increase in terrorism — all while Secretary of State John Kerry negotiates lucrative sanctions relief as part of a lousy nuclear agreement with that nation.

“ISIL and AQ were far from the only serious threat that confronted the United States and its allies,” according to the report. “Iran continued to sponsor terrorist groups around the world, principally through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF).”

Though Iran is no friend of the Islamic State, its methods don’t differ all that much. “Tehran increased its assistance to Shiite militias fighting in Iraq and continued its long-standing military, intelligence and financial aid to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Syrian President Bashar Assad’s embattled government and Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” notes the Associated Press. The AP added, “While the 388-page [State Department] study said Iran has lived up to interim nuclear deals with world powers thus far, it gave no prediction about how an Iran flush with cash from a final agreement would behave.”

That’s reassuring.

But at least Obama’s worried about it, says White House spokesman Eric Schultz: America’s “grave concern about Iran’s support for terrorism remains unabated. That is all the more reason that we need to make sure they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”

If only Obama’s deal would in fact ensure that.

In short, all of Obama’s assurances that terrorists were defeated, decimated or otherwise diminished by his policies were bunk. His policies have failed, and the world is paying the steep price of his “leadership.”