There have been multiple terror attacks around the world in just the last week. As we watch the end of the Obama years and the onset of the Trump administration, we will soon see the American government talking about radical Islamic terrorism. No longer will the government of the USA be unwilling to call the attackers what they really are. This will be a big change.
In the last few days, however, I have seen multiple articles in the mainstream media recognizing the coming change but deriding it as meaningless. The articles basically say "so what!" We will call them radical Islamic terrorists, but that surely won't stop them. These articles are proof that the left still misses the point when it comes to terrorism.
The problem with the Obama policy has not been just that the president and the government refused to use three words, "radical Islamic terrorism." The problem has been that in order to avoid characterizing our adversaries as Islamic terrorists, Obama required that our strategists and armed forces stay away from strategies designed to deal with the specifics of this violent brand of Islam. In other words, Obama refused to allow the USA to recognize the true nature of the enemy, so our forces were unable to focus our strategies to defeat that specific enemy. In many ways, the failure by Obama has been that he tried to have our military response to the terrorists mirror the approach of the TSA at the nation's airports. The TSA selects people to get heightened scrutiny at random rather than focusing on those who are more likely to be terrorists. The result is that 85 year old women using walkers get searched while 23 year old suspicious men do not. The left gets to congratulate itself that we don't profile people, but security suffers. When you use this approach across all anti-terror activities, the result is more terrorism.
Moving from a fantasy in which our adversaries are not really Islamic to the reality in which we recognize the true nature of the enemy and focus on that nature in order to develop a plan to defeat them will be a major step up in the nation's anti-terror activities.
In the last few days, however, I have seen multiple articles in the mainstream media recognizing the coming change but deriding it as meaningless. The articles basically say "so what!" We will call them radical Islamic terrorists, but that surely won't stop them. These articles are proof that the left still misses the point when it comes to terrorism.
The problem with the Obama policy has not been just that the president and the government refused to use three words, "radical Islamic terrorism." The problem has been that in order to avoid characterizing our adversaries as Islamic terrorists, Obama required that our strategists and armed forces stay away from strategies designed to deal with the specifics of this violent brand of Islam. In other words, Obama refused to allow the USA to recognize the true nature of the enemy, so our forces were unable to focus our strategies to defeat that specific enemy. In many ways, the failure by Obama has been that he tried to have our military response to the terrorists mirror the approach of the TSA at the nation's airports. The TSA selects people to get heightened scrutiny at random rather than focusing on those who are more likely to be terrorists. The result is that 85 year old women using walkers get searched while 23 year old suspicious men do not. The left gets to congratulate itself that we don't profile people, but security suffers. When you use this approach across all anti-terror activities, the result is more terrorism.
Moving from a fantasy in which our adversaries are not really Islamic to the reality in which we recognize the true nature of the enemy and focus on that nature in order to develop a plan to defeat them will be a major step up in the nation's anti-terror activities.
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