Terrorism has once again reared its terrible head on American soil. On 9/11, mass murder perpetrated by radical Islamic terrorists took the lives of nearly three thousand people in New York, and others in Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania.
These radical cowards struck again with the murder of 14 American citizens in California. The fact that these radical terrorists have successfully struck again in this country is extremely threatening and problematic, as well as scary and perplexing.
In view of an upcoming presidential election, the latest terror attack in this country is a game changer. The current administration has been hesitant to even call radical terrorism what it is – radical terrorism. The current administration has been hesitant to join the battle against ISIS raging in the Middle East and other countries around the globe. This is indeed a threat to western civilization.
I distinctly remember the first course I took at Washington College was “Western Civilization.” That was over 50 years ago. Incorporated in that course was evidence of the threats from Islamic nations against the West. However today, these threats are real and Americans have died here on our soil. It is quite possible that more Americans will die at the hands of these barbarians. This fight is a battle to protect democracy.
There is apparently no Winston Churchill on the scene today, to warn the free world of real threats as he did so effectively.
There is no American leader, especially for the past seven years. This is why the election of a new president is so vital. America must have a strong, forceful president. The enemy is at our doors and on our soil. We are indeed at war with Islamic terrorists. This demands a leader of the nation who understands American power and the ability to use this power, whether it is militarily or diplomatically.
Fear is now awash in the land and growing daily. Americans want a strong, serious and effective president who speaks clearly and does not manipulate or withhold the facts. Americans can be at their best when they are told the real facts by their leaders.
The president said nothing new in his Sunday night address to the nation with the exception of admitting that America has experienced another terrorist attack. Finally, he gets that basic fact. How he will deal with it is another matter. His address did not assuage the growing fear of citizens’ of this country. Consider that recently on Black Friday, 185,000 people applied for background checks in order to purchase firearms. Surely, all of these folks are not going duck hunting. In view of the long reach of ISIS, they seek to protect their lives and property.
ISIS still is intent on establishing a global caliphate (nation). They are heavily supplied and financed. They are brutal and remain with the mentality and commitment to kill westerners, especially Americans.
The radical Islamic terrorists are at our door and in more neighborhoods than our government wants to admit to. The continuing strategy repeated by the President, will not defeat ISIS.
Joe Lill says
It’s naive to think that there will be any great ISIS surrender ceremony on the flight deck of an American aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf any time soon, or ever. It’s not that kind of war.
Ed Plaisance says
To fully address the unreasonable paranoia and ignorance present here would take too much time. That can be left to others who may relish the opportunity.
But I will tell you who I am afraid of by way of illustration: National statistics on gun violence record roughly 30,000 deaths per year in the USA. Yes, that is almost 100 per day. I found it hard to believe when I was doing the Google searches.
If we calculate from 2000 to the end of 2015, gun deaths amount to 450,000 deaths in this country.
How many people died from Islamic extremists over the same time period?
Slightly over 3000. (And that was mainly from a single event that was not repeated.)
You do the math.
Your White Anglo-Saxon Protestant red-blooded American fellow citizen is more likely to be the cause of your demise.
That is who I am more afraid of.
Why can’t we get more excited about this “terrorism”?
Deirdre LaMotte says
Well put. Perhaps focusing on terrorist deflects the root cause of the problem: guns.
MARY WOOD says
More guns are the problem, not the solution.
Joe Lill says
Maybe we should ask the people from the church in Charleston….or from the Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs….or the theater in Aurora, Colorado….or any one of the mass murders that happen more than once a day just one question. What is THEIR definition of terrorism.
joe diamond says
‘Fear is now awash in the land and growing daily. Americans want a strong, serious and effective president who speaks clearly and does not manipulate or withhold the facts. Americans can be at their best when they are told the real facts by their leaders.”
When did that ever happen?
And get your fear-o-meter tested…………..no fear detected here………….just pretenders to the throne making noise. We have the largest military force on the planet with no enemy in sight. We spend more than the next 20 countries combined on national defense. Allowing our own and the experts of other nations to work and acting on their results will do more for national safety.
Ed Plaisance says
Hear, hear. That same military could wipe Al Baghdadi and his cohorts off the face of Iraq and Syria (albeit with collateral damage) in probably 24 to 48 hours. BUT THAT WOULD NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM. It is a generational problem that will take diplomatic, military, social, religious, financial, political, and more efforts to maybe…maybe…fix it.
I keep harking back to the “law of unintended consequences” and Bush and Co.’s decision to enter Iraq. Crushing Saddam and the Iraqi army was the easy part, as we have all witnessed. What followed was a disaster. We can follow the thread from that directly to to Daesh today. Have we learned nothing?
Ed Plaisance says
I would encourage everyone to read this article. It is an excellent example of geopolitical analysis.
https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/panic-makes-poor-counterterrorism
James Nick says
No one disagrees that the attack in San Bernadino was an alarming reminder of the ability of international, religiously inspired terrorism to reach out and touch our shores. Just like the Boston marathon bombing and the Fort Hood shooting before that, the California attack represented the worst-case scenario for those tasked with keeping our homeland safe. These attacks were not carried out by teams of battle-hardened jehadis evading our border security measures but by lone wolf, self-radicalized permanent residents and/or citizens of the US whose ordinariness allowed them to operate below the radar. It is right that we should be concerned and vigilant and do whatever it takes to defend ourselves and eliminate ISIS as a threat.
But how we respond to these attacks and what we do to stop ISIS is another story. Predictably, Mr Hall has chosen to take the low road. He seeks to stoke irrational fears with false canards and sow domestic discord and divisiveness. He also echoes reckless and sweeping indictments coming from Republican presidential candidates about where the blame lies that undermine the capacity of our government to effectively respond and can endanger the safety of our soldiers already deployed in the Middle East fighting ISIS. But what else should we expect in this era of hyper-partisanship overlaid on top of a presidential election cycle.
To amp up the fear factor, Mr Hall literally recapitulates the 1950’s Joseph McCarthy theme of communists on our soil, in your neighborhood, and at your door except updated with a global replace of the word “communist” with some permutation of “radical Islamic terrorism”. He stokes the be-afraid-be-very-afraid theme by highlighting this year’s Black Friday spike in applications for firearm background checks and attributing it to people seeking to protect themselves from the “long reach of ISIS”. Perhaps Mr Hall is counting on the fact that our mass murders are now happening so often that it’s getting hard to remember the details but the San Bernadino attack occurred five days after Black Friday. The more likely explanation for the spike in gun sales was a reaction to the mass shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado that day. The fear operating was not of ISIS but of the potential for new laws that might actually regulate arms like the Second Amendment intended. It is the typical gun buying pattern that occurs over and over after each massacre.
The fact is, it is much more likely, by several orders of magnitude, that these guns will be used to kill people in domestic gun violence. In the 14 years since 9/11, 45 people have been killed by ideologically motivated terrorist action in the US. In just 2015 alone, 12,000 Americans have been killed from domestic gun violence that had no religious roots.
Mr Hall also trots out the usual and expected partisan attacks by demeaning president Obama’s anti-ISIS policy as being weak and indecisive even though virtually all the Republican candidates have proposed exactly the same policy prescriptions with only minor variations.
Right now, there is a multinational coalition led by the US that has launched over 8,000 airstrikes against ISIS. Leaders have been killed in drone strikes, the latest being the ISIS Finance Minister just last week. Officials from 19 countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the US and Turkey have met to devise a strategy for ending the conflict in Syria. Roughly 3,500 US troops are now in Iraq embedded with the Iraqi army and the Kurds in Syria. And the US is providing weapons and supplies to groups fighting ISIS. But we are asked to believe that Republicans would somehow do it all better by, say, carpet bombing the “crap” out of ISIS. Just ask the Brits how much Nazi carpet bombing diminished their will to fight during the Blitz in WW II.
But by far, the most reckless theme running through Mr Hall’s comments is the Republican fixation on baiting president Obama to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”. The dog whistle underlying the taunt is obvious: Republicans want the president to explicitly label Islam as an inherently terroristic religion antithetical to American Christian values. The only thing missing is an emoticon tacked on to the end of the phrase bearing an image of Muhammad with a bomb coming out of his turban.
As shown by George Bush’s chest-thumping misadventures in Iraq that left our military depleted and our treasury empty, we do not have enough manpower, money, or persistence to fight a sustained ground war and occupy vast territory long enough to effect a change in the Middle East to insure that the ideology of radical jihadism will be contained, if not stamped out.
The only hope for defeating ISIS is to build alliances with moderate indigenous forces that have skin in the game that have the will and means to do the heavy lifting. A model for this was the counterinsurgency strategy used by General Petraeus during the 2007 Surge in Iraq to expel Al Qaeda from Baghdad and Anbar Province where they had worn out their welcome with indiscriminate brutality directed at fellow Muslims. The Surge worked because relationships and trust were built between the locals and the US military by minimizing civilian casualties with measured use of force, dialing back the use of overwhelming fire-power including bombing, and soldiers using more restraint.
The Kurds and other moderates we will need in order to ultimately prevail over ISIS and secure the region long term are all devout Muslims. How on earth is any president going to convince these people to join in an alliance against ISIS if all they keep hearing from our leaders is a constant refrain about the inherent evils of their religion? How will that win hearts and minds? How do they feel when they hear their religion constantly vilified and by provocations of violence directed at Muslims in the US? Indeed, what should they think when they hear that they are not even welcomed to visit our country and how there are some Americans that want to put US Muslim citizens in internment camps? As Commander-in-Chief, are people really expecting President Obama to declare Islam to be the scourge of Western civilization and place our present and future ground forces in the Middle East in even more jeopardy?
Finally, to the extent that there are people who only respond to base fear, consider this. Islam already has the Bomb in the form of a formidable nuclear arsenal sitting in Pakistan. If the shrill rhetoric we keep hearing coming out of the mouths irresponsible Republican candidates should ever emerge as actionable US foreign policy it would be a failure of our imagination to discount the possibility that a nuclear device could find its way into the hands of ISIS via a zealous Pakistani general wanting to make the ultimate statement.
Ed Plaisance says
Very cogently presented. Thank you for taking the time to lay it all out.
Your worries about finding and keeping allies are echoed by Tom Friedman in his recent article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/opinion/you-aint-no-american-bro.html
Having spent over 35 years in the Middle East and being married to Persian, and being able to communicate fluently in Persian, I have been embarrassed and exasperated more times than I can count in having to explain our idiocies to friends, family, and acquaintances. Sometimes, I would resort to saying something like: “Just because we have the biggest economy, the most powerful military in the world, and everyone wants a visa to America, does not mean we are the smartest. We have a lot of stupid and ignorant people in our country.”
Gren Whitman says
Because the perps have Pakistani-Muslim origins, etc., the FBI is quickly labeling the San Bernardino atrocity as “terrorism”.
But those murdered in at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs were just as terrified.
And are just as dead!
Q: What’s the difference between a “mass shooting” and “terrorism”?
A: Politics.