Denial Won’t Make the Threat of Terrorism Go Away
Time to wake up before terror comes to a theater near you.
Some thoughts from Investor’s Business Daily’s Andrew Malcolm on Friday’s carnage in Paris:
Remember how al Qaeda was on the run in 2012? There was no global war on terror, Obama claimed. How Obama mocked Mitt Romney for seeing Russia as a strategic opponent. The counter-terrorism success story Obama hailed in Yemen, just months before its government fell to rebels and the U.S. lost a half-billion dollars in military equipment.
Nearly two years ago Obama dismissed ISIS as a “JV” team. Six months later he admitted he had no strategy to combat the rampaging terrorists shooting, torturing, crucifying, beheading and incinerating thousands of Muslims and Christians in Syria and Iraq. Last spring Obama declared the U.S. was winning against ISIS.
This fall Obama abandoned a much-vaunted program to train Syrian rebels that produced about a dozen soldiers for nearly $50 million. When a Delta Force officer was killed in a raid on an ISIS prison this autumn, Obama aides argued that was not really combat. Obama later dispatched 50 Special Ops troops to fight ISIS’ estimated 40,000 troops.
ISIS affiliates have emerged in Libya and Afghanistan and apparently in Egypt’s Sinai, where a Russian airliner was recently downed by sabotage. Now, the attacks in France by at least one Syrian refugee and fears of assaults in North America. Ben Rhodes, an Obama national security aide, sought to downplay homeland attack fears: “There’s not a specific, credible threat to the homeland at this time.”
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, says Obama needs to wake up:
After years of dismissing the rising terror threat, Mr. Obama needs an epiphany if he doesn’t want to be remembered as the President who allowed radical Islam to spread and prosper. …
Jimmy Carter shed his illusions about the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and Mr. Obama needs a comparable rendezvous with reality. This will be harder for Mr. Obama, a man of great ideological vanity, but perhaps the prospect of defeat for his party in 2016 will force him to see the world more clearly.
