Americans Are Focused On The Wrong National Security Issues

 

 

Americans Are Focused On The Wrong National Security Issues

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Published on Wednesday, 20 March 2013 05:50

Written by Col. Tom Snodgrass (Ret.)

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Including Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, Rand Paul, John McCain, And Laura Ingraham, To Name But The Most Prominent

By Col. Tom Snodgrass (Ret.), Right Side News

President Barack Obama has totally changed U.S. national security policy by rejecting the confused President George w. Bush administration's schizophrenic approach to Islam that simultaneously declared war on the product of Islam, which is worldwide jihadist terror, while embracing the contradictory concept that Islam is the "religion of peace."

Instead of continuing Bush's war on Islamic jihadist terror, Obama has completely changed the narrative by denying that there is such a thing as Islamic jihadist terror. He has attempted this reversal of reality by banning all mention of Islamic jihadist terrorism from the official lexicon of the U.S. Government.

The Key Players And Their Issues

When President Barack Obama took over the misnamed “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) from President George Bush, he began by increasing the Bush-created deceit that the Islamic jihadist war was just a few Muslims misinterpreting the theological tenets of Islam. Obama launched his redoubled deception by having Obama regime minions like Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano rename the GWOT as “Overseas Contingency Operations” and “terror attacks” as “man-caused disasters.”

Furthermore, words such as “Islam,” “Quran,” “Sharia,” “jihad,” and “militant Muslim terrorist” have been completely stripped out of the Obama regime’s National Security Strategy, in fact, anything indicating that Islam is the cause of the worldwide jihadist death and destruction has been stricken from all Obama regime written and oral discussions of this on-going world war. A prime example is the mendacious talking-points memo crafted to lie to the American people about the Benghazi jihadist murders of the four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador. Another example is Obama’s attempt to reclassify jihadist terrorists from “enemy combatants” to being merely “criminal defendants” by closing the Guantanamo detention camp and transferring the prisoners to the federal judicial system in the U.S. – that legal-political battle is still being fought. But by far the most egregious example is Obama’s ludicrous classification of Nidal Malik Hassan’s jihadist shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, in which he murdered 13 people and wounded 29 more, as “workplace violence!”

This past week there was much political commotion concerning Senator Rand Paul’s almost thirteen hour filibuster of the nomination of John Brennan to be Director of the CIA in order to force Attorney General Eric Holder to affirm that President Obama does not have the constitutional authority to launch a drone missile attack to kill a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil without trial. Paul had asked this question of the Attorney General previously and had received an answer that implied the president does have the authority, an answer that Paul considered unsatisfactory. After the filibuster the White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, read Paul’s question and Holder’s reconsidered answer.

“According to Carney, Paul asked, ‘Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’

“In his response, also read by Carney, Holder replied succinctly: ‘The answer to that question is no.’"

After all was said and done, Brennan was confirmed as CIA director the next day. However, it did not end there – in response to Paul’s filibuster, dissention erupted in the ranks of the Republican Party when the leader of the “Republicans in name only” (RINOs) and “neoconservatives” (neocons), Senator John McCain, mocked Paul and those Republicans who had supported him in his filibuster as “wacko birds.” Furthermore, McCain stated that Paul’s harangue against extrajudicial drone killings was "simply false" and that, “I think it can be harmful if there is a belief among the American people that those people are reflective of the views of the majority of Republicans. They’re not.”

In reaction to McCain, conservative radio commentator Laura Ingraham came to Paul’s defense, speaking out for Paul’s filibuster and praising the fact that the Kentucky senator had stood up to the Obama regime, igniting a ground swell of enthusiasm among many Republicans who have tired of the RINOs continual milquetoast behavior of caving in to Obama. Furthermore, Ingraham indicated that she endorsed Paul’s opposition to the Republican neocons because, according to her, “the perpetual war drums have hurt the Republican Party.”

Delineating The Issues

The first and most important issue that must be clarified for Americans to understand the current state of relations between the Islamic world and the U.S. is the Obama regime’s basic assumption concerning Islam that is underlying Obama’s national security and foreign policies. As Obama’s concerted efforts to deny and conceal the existence of Islamic jihad make abundantly apparent, Obama has a very accommodating and laissez faire attitude toward Islam and its hostile jihadist mindset. Recently Obama’s accommodation was spectacularly demonstrated by his decision to supply Egypt’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and its anti-American, anti-Semitic president, Mohamed Morsi, with 20 first-line F-16 jet fighters and 200 of the world’s best M-1 tanks. However, in seeming contradiction to his accommodation of Islam, Obama’s warfare strategy for dealing with al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists is to use unmanned aerial vehicles to kill jihadists much more aggressively that did the Bush administration. Obama’s willingness to exterminate jihadists with drones in spite of his accommodating Islamophile attitude is best explained as follows:

“There are logical explanations for Obama’s drone warfare. In order to not make U.S. patriots in the law enforcement, intelligence, and military communities too upset or suspicious, Obama has turned loose U.S. killer drones to exterminate as many fanatical jihadists as possible in remote jihad breeding grounds. This mass killing of extreme jihadists from the air in an “antiseptic way” has a number of benefits for Obama. First, it gives cover to Obama’s pro-Islamic actions to deceive concerned Americans. Second, it eliminates incorrigible jihadists who cannot be bargained with and who would attack U.S. interests, thus embarrassing Obama and putting irresistible pressure on him to act more decisively against Islam. Third, killing these jihadists cancels the need to incarcerate them at Guantanamo, thus alienating Obama’s leftist allies. And four, killing not capturing precludes gaining beneficial intelligence from prisoners to use against the Islamic jihadists.”

In view of the seeming contradiction in Obama’s approach to dealing with Islam, what conclusion can be drawn? Many on the right have simply concluded that Obama is a closet Muslim practicing the Islamic deception of “taqiyya” to conceal his true religious allegiance. Certainly such a case could be made, but pursuing the determination an individual’s religious belief went out with the Inquisition, and it is beyond the scope of this essay. However, irrespective whether Obama is a secret Muslim or just an Islamophile, there is no question that he is the most pro-Islamic president in American history, which brings the focus back to Obama’s basic assumption concerning Islam that is underlying his national security and foreign policies.

Andy McCarthy has advanced a plausible assumption to explain Obama’s benign attitude toward Islam that does not smack of treason or any of the other subversive charges often leveled against Obama by my fellow conservatives. Mr. McCarthy has theorized, “The Obama administration has evidently convinced itself that Islamic supremacism is the solution, not the problem, in the Middle East.” If Obama believes that aligning with the forces of Islamic supremacism is the best course of action for the U.S., it would explain why Obama denies that Islamic jihad is a national security threat, why he wants Guantanamo detainees reclassified as criminal defendants instead of enemy combatants, and why he is willing to supply Egypt’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood with world class American weapons systems. Obama sees the U.S. future in terms of accommodation with Islamic supremacism.

However, if Obama actually believes that U.S. national security interests are best served by allying with Islamic supremacism, his would be a national defense misjudgment greater even than Neville Chamberlin’s. But, unfortunately, such a monumental security misjudgment would be in keeping with Obama’s equally monumental misjudgment that he is improving the U.S. economy and society by instituting unaffordable “social justice” programs like Obamacare. Therefore, Obama’s economic, national security, and foreign policies may not be deliberately intended to be destructive of American institutions as is widely believed. It may be Obama’s sincere belief that his Alinskyite policies are in fact pro-American, and will improve the lives of U.S. citizens. After all, Obama’s economic, national security, and foreign policies are not a big departure from the Democrat Party’s “progressive” political platforms since the 1960s. Obviously Obama meant it when he said just before beginning his first term, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” However, the vast majority of Americans did not understand that the change Obama promised was so fatuous and dysfunctional that it could result in America committing “obamacide,” if his change is continued unchecked.

Now, moving from the Obama regime’s naive and counterfactual assumption about the possibility of accommodation with Islamic supremacism to the Paul-McCain-Ingraham face-off, the one person who added some clarity what is at issue here was Rush Limbaugh.

“There is a fear among McCain, Lindsey Graham, and others who favor an interventionist foreign policy,” Limbaugh said on his afternoon radio show. “They’re worried that Rand Paul’s diatribe on drones really means that Rand Paul wants to bring the military home and not use it unless we’re attacked.

“Rand Paul made a connection with the American people,” Limbaugh continued. “These other people do not. Therefore, he has the ability to influence and motivate people. They’re afraid that what Rand Paul was doing was not just speaking out against the use of drones on American citizens on American soil.

“They’re afraid that Rand Paul is actually setting the stage for building up public support to stop the interventionist usage of American military might and foreign policy all over the world,” Limbaugh said.”

Although Senator Paul maintained his filibuster issue was presidential authority to execute untried U.S. citizens on U.S. soil with drone-launched missiles, Senator McCain held that that issue was not worth the time and effort because the use of drone missiles within the U.S. was not realistic or needed. But, as Limbaugh indicated, in reality McCain feared that Paul’s opposition to drones was really aimed at restricting U.S. drone warfare overseas. In that vein, McCain’s neocons are very sensitive to any moves by Paul’s isolationist libertarians to circumscribe the ability of U.S. forces to intervene anywhere overseas against jihadist activities. In Paul’s own words, “There will be a place for people in the party who believe in a less aggressive foreign policy.” It was on this point that Ms. Ingraham indicated that she believed the McCain neocons were too anxious to use military intervention as a general rule, and that McCain’s enthusiasm to use military force was hurting the Republican Party politically.

The Issues Analyzed

The fundamental issue that the American people urgently need to focus on regarding President Obama’s national security and foreign policies is his assumption that the U.S. can reach a trustworthy accommodation with Islamic supremacism. Is Obama’s Islamic accommodation assumption a reliable basis upon which to risk American lives and U.S. foreign aid and relations? The American people are owed a national dialogue and explanation why Obama assumes we can trust Islamic supremacism when the Quran commands Muslims not to befriend or trust Christians and Jews (Quran 5:51)? Another Islamic scriptural command that demands explanation is the Islamic Sharia law injunction to wage religious war against non-Muslims until they convert to Islam, surrender and obey Sharia law, or are wiped out (Sharia o9.0: Jihad). Such are the outcomes expected of Islamic jihadist war. Since Americans are being asked to base our national security on the assumption of accommodation with Islamic supremacism by the Obama regime, these troubling Quran and Sharia commandments (and hundreds more) need to be reconciled with Obama’s accommodation assumption in national dialogue. The correct questions to be asked to examine Obama’s Islamic accommodation assumption are: (1) What is the true nature of Islam; and (2) Is Islam at war with us?

The answers to those two questions are very transparent in the Quran and Sharia. Muhammad, founder of Islam, described the purpose of the Muslim religion as, “I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat [a Muslim poor tax that is also used to fund jihad]. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And their final reckoning is with Allah (Sharia o9.0: Jihad).” Muhammad certainly left no ambiguity in Islam’s mission statement, that is, non-Muslims are Islamic supremacism’s enemy to be fought and conquered. Irrespective of what Obama personally assumes about Islam, the U.S., as the designated enemy of Islamic supremacist jihad, can’t just assume the war is over and that Islamic supremacism will accommodate non-Muslims. Islamic supremacist jihad’s enemy can only convert, or surrender and obey, or fight to the death. That is according to “Islamic sacred scripture.”

With respect to the Paul-McCain-Ingraham brouhaha, the real issue was not the use of drone strikes within the U.S. The actual issue is the Republican Party’s propensity to advocate foreign military intervention. It is Senator Paul’s position that the nation has “war weariness” and that it is in the party’s best interest to disengage from the Bush-Cheney militant approach to foreign policy. Senator McCain holds the opposite position that the U.S. should intervene militarily to install democracy through nation-building when our interests are threatened in the Islamic world. Ms. Ingraham and Senator Paul are both correct that the country is war weary, but their apparent idea that the U.S. can just ignore foreign jihadist threats is as unrealistic as Obama’s Islamic accommodation assumption.

The reason why the country is war weary is that the U.S. has pursued the Bush-Cheney-McCain nation-building, democracy-installing, military-intervention strategy. The Paul-Ingraham solution to this war weariness is just not to send the U.S. military abroad. In reality, the solution is not to pursue the Bush-Cheney-McCain nation-building, democracy-installing, military-intervention strategy because that strategy is based on fighting a counterinsurgency war.

“One problem with counterinsurgency is that it is basically a defensive, reactive form of war. Defensive war is by definition only victorious when the enemy ceases making war. Thus, counterinsurgency concedes the initiative to the enemy. While not totally impossible, war is most difficult to win when the enemy holds the initiative. It is almost impossible to destroy an enemy’s motivation and/or capability when fighting in a reactive mode on the enemy’s terms. Victory in war on the defensive usually requires the enemy to make monumental blunders in his offensive operations, thus defeating himself.

“Another problem with the counterinsurgency strategy for the American people is that our government has used counterinsurgency as a substitute for waging a war that actually eliminates the threat, which has caused the conflict in the first place. In other words, it is easier to wage a type of ‘limited war’ counterinsurgency combat that avoids hard decisions, which may entail the wider war necessary to remove the true and underlying threat to U.S. national interests. The proof for this controversial contention may be found in three pertinent cases – Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”

“To sum up, the ‘limited war’ doctrine reigns in U.S. Government policy circles today, and it in turn has fostered the employment of the defensive counterinsurgency strategy. As a consequence, after 9/11 when the U.S. entered into the GWOT, our national strategic thinking was not geared for global war. Hence both opponents and proponents of GWOT measured the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan solely in terms of ‘limited war.’ We continue to be trapped in the same mental box that pre-ordained our Vietnam defeat. It is not widely understood that Afghanistan is merely a campaign in the GWOT, not a limited “Afghanistan War.” Today we are battling the Shari’a faithful Muslims of the world who wish to establish a Shari’a-based worldwide Caliphate . . . .”

Conclusion

There are two primary national security issues that the American people should be focused on. First, we need to define Islam in the terms that Islam defines itself, which unquestionably delineates Islamic supremacism as America’s implacable enemy. Second, the real accommodation with Islamic supremacism envisioned by Obama will never be possible because, according to the Quran and Sharia, Islamic jihadist warfare can only end when non-Muslims convert, or surrender and obey Islamic law, or are put to death. Therefore, foreign military interventions will continue to be necessary in the future to protect U.S. national interests. Hence, the U.S. requires a new military strategy that does not involve nation-building, democracy-installing, military-intervention.

Col. Thomas Snodgrass, USAF (retired) served over a year in Peshawar, Pakistan, working with Pakistani military intelligence, and he was variously an Intelligence Officer or an International Politico-Military Affairs Officer in assignments in six other foreign countries during a thirty-year military career. Additionally, he was awarded a year’s educational sabbatical teaching and writing as an Air Force Research Associate at the Center for Advanced International Studies, University of Miami, Florida. He has taught history at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Arizona, for ten years after his military service.