Waiting for ISIS to Strike - The Patriot Post

On Sunday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson confirmed what many Americans have long suspected: The Obama administration’s response to ISIS will be reactive rather than proactive. In other words, it is quite likely American lives will be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness before anything is done to seriously counteract the growing threat posed by these bloodthirsty savages.

“We’re definitely in a new phase in the global terrorist threat where the so-called lone wolf could strike at any moment,” Johnson told ABC’s Martha Raddatz. “It is a new environment, but we are not discouraging Americans from doing the things they do on a daily basis.”

It is hard to imagine what is worse: President Obama dismissing this group as a JV team (and then lying about doing so), or an equally mendacious Johnson clinging to the "lone wolf" meme, as if Americans are supposed to gain comfort from the idea that a smaller number of terrorists committing mass murder, as the trio of killers who massacred 12 people in Paris managed to do, is preferable to a larger force committing the same atrocities. Perhaps someone should remind Johnson that it took only 19 dedicated souls to bring down the World Trade Center, do considerable damage to the Pentagon, and kill nearly three thousand Americans in the process.

That would be the very same Jeh Johnson who in April told Congress his Department has not only failed to gain situational control of our Southwest border, but it remains in the dark about “situational awareness” as well. How long will it take to get up to speed? “I don’t know that we’ll be able to achieve that before the end of this administration,” he told Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NB) during a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.

April is the same month the U.S. State Department declared as “unfounded” reports that ISIS fighters operating in alliance with Mexican drug cartels created training bases just over the border. Yet even as it did so, officials admitted Mexican authorities found plans written in Arabic and Urdu in the town of Anapra. Again, it is worth remembering this is the same State Department that invested considerable time and energy in an effort to convince Americans the attack in Benghazi was precipitated by an inflammatory video, even as emails obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that advisors to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knew almost immediately the attack was perpetrated by terrorists, and that Ansar al Sharia claimed credit for it.

Moreover, despite the attack that took place in Garland, Texas, in response to Pam Geller’s Draw Mohammed contest — again dismissed as a “lone wolf” effort — the Pentagon raised the threat level at military bases around the nation for the first time since the 9/11 atrocity. “We’ve seen what happened in Texas, we’ve seen other social media and internet-based discussions and threats, and so we have detected a general increase in the overall environment that’s caused us to want to do this,” said Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren. “There is no known threat to any specific place.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m guessing if professionally trained and armed military personnel on military bases are perceived to be under a greater threat, I suspect ordinary Americans hanging out at shopping malls, train stations and numerous other “soft targets” — for which jihadists have a soft spot in their murderous hearts — might be under an increased threat as well. What about local authorities, who would be the first line of defense if such an attack occurred? Johnson characterized the efforts of those local agencies as “still a work in progress,” further insisting the local Islamic communities should bear some responsibility for disabusing potential recruits to ISIS. “It has to come from within the community,” he said. “It has to come from Islamic leaders, who frankly can talk the language better than the federal government can and so when I meet with community leaders, Islamic leaders, that’s one of the things that we urge them to do.”

Former CIA veteran Michael Morell was far less sanguine. While he believes the Garland attack was only inspired by ISIS, it’s only a matter of time before the group gets its domestic act together. “If we don’t get ISIS under control, we’re going to see that kind of attack,” Morell said, referring to 9/11. He cited the ineffectiveness of the Obama administration’s effort to counteract ISIS’s success in recruiting hundreds of American converts, “and we’re not effective at it because it’s very hard to do,” he added. He further noted that it was “a mistake to think that al-Qaeda died along with bin Laden in Abbottabad,” which he characterized as an assumption made by relieved Americans.

An assumption made by Americans? Morell apparently forgets that President Obama spent large chunks of his 2012 presidential campaign assuring the American public that Osama Bin Laden was dead, terror was “on the run” and al Qaeda was “decimated.” So where are they today? “They today have the ability to bring down an airliner in the United States,” Morell believes. “If that happened tomorrow, I would not be surprised.”

Why should anyone be surprised? The terrorist threat continues to metastasize in direct proportion to the Obama administration’s infuriating indifference to it. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper noted in February, 2014 was the deadliest year for worldwide terror “in the 45 years such data has been compiled,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. That statement stands in stark contrast to one by Secretary of State John Kerry, who insisted we are “actually living in a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world than normally; less deaths, less violent deaths today, than through the last century.” Apparently we’re supposed to take comfort in the fact that we haven’t experienced two world wars in the first 15 years of the 21st century. Or perhaps Kerry was merely taking his cue from Obama, who last summer assured us the world is “less violent than it has ever been.”

That would be the same Obama who promised us he would be training the so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels to counteract the jihadist threat. How’s that going? Last September Congress gave the president the go ahead to do so. Last Thursday, eight months later, Defense Secretary Ash Carter revealed that a whopping 90 of moderate rebels were being trained. This follows an initial vetting of 3,750 rebels and 400 rebels who are now in a second level of review, officials told the Wall Street Journal.

So much for urgency. In the meantime, Congress is focused on doing what it does best: scribbling around the margins. "Let’s face it: We invented the Internet. We invented the social network sites. We’ve got Hollywood. We’ve got the capabilities to blow these guys out of the water from the standpoint of communications,“ declared Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) during a Homeland Security Committee hearing on ”Jihad 2.0,“ an effort to counteract ISIS’s social media success. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) agreed. "Look at their fancy memes compared to what we’re not doing,” Booker said, adding that "there are easy tactics how to get more voice, virality to messaging that we’re not using as a government.“

No doubt such a campaign has the same chance for "success” that the Twitter campaign #bringbackourgirls evinced following the Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 300 young girls. A year after that campaign ensued, Boko Haram remains as lethal as ever.

In reality — a province despised by the Obama administration and its equally myopic followers — there is only one “campaign” that will put a serious crimp in ISIS’s ambitions: A decisive application of military force so overwhelming and deadly that anyone who would contemplate joining their ranks would realize the doing so constitutes a self-inflicted death warrant. Unfortunately, such an effort would more than likely require American “boots on the ground,” a concept utterly anathema to this administration, despite the fact it is precisely ISIS’s ongoing military success that breeds its recruitment success. One would think such cause and effect would be transparent. Yet, as indicated here, the intentionally lackadaisical effort to secure our borders, the raising of the threat level on our domestic military bases, the glacial-paced effort to recruit foreign fighters and the equally flaccid attempt to create counter-programming for social media all indicate one thing: Something spectacularly horrific must be inflicted on America prior to any genuine effort to eliminate the jihadist threat. That anyone would countenance the death of Americans such a tradeoff would necessitate is a testament to the poisonous level of political correctness that afflicts the Obama administration.

Columnist Mark Steyn asks the ultimate question about a president who won’t even name the enemy we face, much less face it head on. “If he were working for the other side,” Steyn writes, “what exactly would he be doing differently?” When our currently strategy consists of little more than waiting for ISIS to strike, such a question becomes virtually impossible to answer.

The Patriot Post® · Waiting for ISIS to Strike