WarSclerotic

Obama’s Self-Defeating Fight, Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, September 16, 2014

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan will either cheer the US on from a distance, or in the best-case scenario, provide logistical support for its operations.

It isn’t just that these states have already been burned by Obama whether through his support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi. And it isn’t simply that they saw that the US left them hanging in Syria.

They see Obama’s “strategy” for fighting IS – ignoring the Islamic belief system that underpins every aspect of its existence, and expecting other armies to fight and die to accomplish the goal while the US turns a blind eye to Turkey’s and Qatar’s continued sponsorship of Islamic State. They see this strategy and they are convinced America is fighting to lose. Why should they go down with it? Islamic State is a challenging foe. To defeat it, the US must be willing to confront Islamism. And it must be willing to fight to win. In the absence of such determination, it will fight and lose, in the region and at home, with no allies at its side.

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The United States has a problem with Islamic State. Its problem is that it refuses to acknowledge why Islamic State is a problem.

The problem with Islamic State is not that it is brutal. Plenty of regimes are brutal.

Islamic State poses two challenges for the US. First, unlike the Saudis and even the Iranians, IS actively recruits Americans and other Westerners to join its lines.

This is a problem because these Americans and other Westerners have embraced an ideology that is viciously hostile to every aspect of Western civilization.

Last Friday, Buzz Feed published a compilation of social media posts published by Western women who have left their homes in Chicago and London and other hometowns to join IS in Syria.

As these women’s social media posts demonstrate, the act of leaving the West and joining IS involves rejecting everything the West is and everything it represents and embracing a culture of violence, murder and degradation.

In the first instance, the women who leave the West to join IS have no qualms about entering a society in which they have no rights. They are happy covering themselves in black from head to toe. They have no problem casting their lot with a society that prohibits females from leaving their homes without male escorts.

They have no problem sharing their husband with other wives. They don’t mind because they believe that in doing so, they are advancing the cause of Islam and Allah.

As the women described it, the hardest part about joining the jihad is breaking the news to your parents back home. But, as one recruiter soothed, “As long as you are firm and you know that this is all for the sake of Allah then nothing can shake you inshalah.”

Firm in their belief that they are part of something holy, the British, American and European jihadistas are completely at ease with IS violence. In one post, a woman nonchalantly described seeing a Yazidi slave girl.

“Walked into a room, gave salam to everyone in the room to find out there was a yazidi slave girl there as well.. she replied to my salam.”

Other posts discussed walking past people getting their hands chopped off and seeing dead bodies on the street. Islamic State’s beheadings of American and British hostages are a cause for celebration.

Their pride at the beheadings of James Foley and others is part and parcel of their hatred for the US and the West. As they see it, destroying the US and the West is a central goal of IS.

As one of the women put it, “Know this Cameron/ Obama, you and your countries will be beneath our feet and your kufr will be destroyed, this is a promise from Allah that we have no doubt over…. This Islamic empire shall be known and feared world wide and we will follow none other than the law of the one and the only ilah!” These women do not feel at all isolated. And they have no reason to. They are surrounded by other Westerners who joined IS for the same reasons they did.

In one recruitment post, Western women were told that not knowing Arabic is no reason to stay home.

“You can still survive if you don’t speak Arabic. You can find almost every race and nationality here.”

The presence of Westerners in IS, indeed, IS’s aggressive efforts to recruit Westerners wouldn’t pose much of a problem for the US if it were willing to secure its borders and recognize the root of the problem.

But as US President Barack Obama made clear over the summer, and indeed since he first took office six years ago, he opposes any effort to secure the US border with Mexico. If these jihadists can get to Mexico, they will, in all likelihood, have no problem coming to America.

But even if the US were to secure its southern border, it would still be unable to prevent these jihadists from returning to attack. The policy of the US government is to deny the existence of a jihadist threat by, among other thing, denying the existence of the ideology of Islamic jihad.

When President Barack Obama insisted last Wednesday that Islamic State is not Islamic, he told all the Westerners who are now proud mujihadin that they shouldn’t worry about coming home. They won’t be screened. As far as the US is concerned their Islamic jihad ideology doesn’t exist.

So whereas every passenger arriving in the US from Liberia can be screened for Ebola, no one will be screened for exposure to jihadist thought.

And this brings us to the second problem IS poses to the US.

As a rising force in the Middle East, IS threatens US allies and it threatens global trade. To prevent its allies from being overthrown and to prevent shocks to the international economy, at a minimum, the US needs to contain IS. And given the threat the Westerners joining the terror army constitute, and Washington’s unwillingness to stop them at the border, in all likelihood, the US needs to destroy IS where it stands.

Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that the US is willing or able to either contain or defeat IS.

As US Maj. Gen. (ret.) Robert Scales wrote over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal, from a military perspective, IS is little different from all the guerrilla forces the US has faced in battle since the Korean War. Scales argues that in all previous such engagements, the outcomes have been discouraging because the US lacks the will to take the battle to the societies that feed them or use its firepower to its full potential out of fear of killing civilians.

Clearly this remains the case today.

Moreover, as Angelo Codevilla explained last month in The Federalist, to truly dry up the swamp feeding IS, it is necessary to take the war to its state sponsors – first and foremost Turkey and Qatar.

In his words, “The first strike against the IS must be aimed at its sources of material support. Turkey and Qatar are very much part of the global economy… If…

the United States decides to kill the IS, it can simply inform Turkey, Qatar, and the world it will have zero economic dealings with these countries and with any country that has any economic dealing with them, unless these countries cease any and all relations with the IS.”

Yet, as we saw on the ground this weekend with US Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed mission to secure Turkish support for the US campaign against IS, the administration has no intention of taking the war to IS’s state sponsors, without which it would be just another jihadi militia jockeying for power in Syria.

And this leaves us with the administration’s plan to assemble a coalition of the willing that will provide the foot soldiers for the US air war against Islamic State.

After a week of talks and shuttle diplomacy, aside from Australia, no one has committed forces. Germany, Britain and France have either refused to participate or have yet to make clear what they are willing to do.

The Kurds will not fight for anything but Kurdistan. The Iraqi Army is a fiction. The Iraqi Sunnis support IS far more than they trust the Americans.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan will either cheer the US on from a distance, or in the best-case scenario, provide logistical support for its operations.

It isn’t just that these states have already been burned by Obama whether through his support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi. And it isn’t simply that they saw that the US left them hanging in Syria.

They see Obama’s “strategy” for fighting IS – ignoring the Islamic belief system that underpins every aspect of its existence, and expecting other armies to fight and die to accomplish the goal while the US turns a blind eye to Turkey’s and Qatar’s continued sponsorship of Islamic State. They see this strategy and they are convinced America is fighting to lose. Why should they go down with it? Islamic State is a challenging foe. To defeat it, the US must be willing to confront Islamism. And it must be willing to fight to win. In the absence of such determination, it will fight and lose, in the region and at home, with no allies at its side.

Obama understands neither war nor Islam, Dan Miller’s Blog, September 14, 2014

Winston Churchill understood both. Instead of “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” Obama offers a coalition of unwilling nations which reject our basic values of freedom. He intends to arm and train “moderate” Islamists who not only reject our basic values but are likely to help the Islamic State and its various cohorts and permutations. 

Islam is as Islamists do

Is Islam the “religion of peace? Here’s a video of a debate held nearly three years ago in New York City.

While arguing that Islam is now peaceful, the debaters so arguing also argued that they hoped it would become so. One even urged those watching the debate to vote that it is a peaceful religion to help it to become one.

Please see also the current discussion at Yale on whether Hirsi Ali should be permitted to speak. The Muslim Students’ Association,

along with 35 co-signing student organizations, including the Yale Women’s Center, the Slifka Center (Yale’s hub for Jewish life), the Black Student Alliance, and Yale Students for Israel, sent a campus-wide e-mail that argued that Hirsi Ali’s history of “hate speech” and provocative statements, which include advocating the “defeat” of Islam, ought to disqualify her from speaking at Yale. They felt “disrespected,” they said, by the very act of inviting her; evidently they found her ideas too dangerous and her words too caustic for the virgin ears of their fellow undergraduates.

Some fine day, Islam may become peaceful and tolerant of other religions. However, we are stuck with Islam as it is now, not as it once may have been and not as it may eventually become. Islam, despite fantasies about the cataclysmic horrors of man-made global warming climate change, is the greatest threat to Western civilization and must be dealt with accordingly.

Obama and the Islamic State

On September 12th, Mark Steyn opined that

When it comes to war, [Obama] suffers from an additional burden: before he can persuade anybody else, he first has to persuade himself. And he can’t do it. So he gave the usual listless performance of a surly actor who resents the part he’s been given. It’s not just the accumulation of equivocations and qualifications – the “Islamic State” is not Islamic, our war with them is not a war, there’ll be no boots on the ground except the exotic footwear of a vast unspecified coalition – but something more basic: What he mainly communicates is that he doesn’t mean it. [Emphasis added.]

Unlike Obama, Churchill left no doubt that he understood war and that he intended to achieve victory over the horrors of Nazism. That is what happened.

Churchill had long urged the civilized world to halt the advance of Nazism. Nazism, Communism and Islam are similar.

[A]ll three are predicated on supremacist propositions – namely that a group of people is inherently superior to all the others.  What exactly that Master Group is depends on the specific differentiator that the particular ideology is centred upon.  Since Nazism saw the world through a ‘racial’ perspective, its fundamental proposition was the superiority of the ‘Aryan race’ (the Master Race or Herrenvolk); centred on ‘social’ differences, the Communists decreed that the ‘proletariat’ was inherently loftier than every other class; for the Islamists, whose particular angle is ‘religious’, it is the adherents of Islam that are ‘entitled’ to unquestioned, divinely-ordained supremacy. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

[A]ll three extreme ideologies promote a world view in which there is an inherent, perpetual and inevitable conflict between the superior or ‘Master Group’ (race, class or religion) and ‘the others’.  ‘The others’, needless to say, despite being fundamentally inferior, are intent on subjugating the Master Group.   The conflict (call it ‘Kampf um Lebensraum’, ‘class struggle’ or ‘jihad’) is fundamental not just to the ideology, but also to its practical implementation.  Conflicts (especially when portrayed as global and quasi-existential) represent ‘exceptional circumstances’ or ‘force majeure’; as such, they justify employing ‘exceptional means’. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

ll three ideologies have a similar ultimate goal: to do away with the extant ‘injustice’ and replace it with a ‘new global order’.  The end is thus, invariably, the ‘Perfect World’; so perfect, in fact, that that end justifies and even sanctifies the murderous means.  That ‘Perfect World’ – call it Millenarian Reich, Global Commune or Islamic Caliphate – will be achieved as a result of the Master Group’s final victory over ‘the others’. [Emphasis added.]

Going to war with Islam may not be enough and “reeducation” may also be necessary. However, it is necessary to get their attention, in ways they can understand, first.

A coalition of the unwilling

Who is in the alleged coalition and what does Obama want them to do? The Obama Administration is not saying.

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough repeatedly declined to say whether any other countries have agreed to provide troops on the ground in Syria as a part of President Obama’s efforts to build a coalition.

He repeatedly said Americans would hear the news from Secretary of State John Kerry later this week.

But then he said that the president wasn’t looking for boots-on-the-ground troops, after all.

“Other [countries] have suggested that they’re willing to do that, but that’s not what we’re looking for right now,” McDonough said.

What does Obama want His alleged coalition to do? Send imams armed with fatwas urging that the IS, et al, repent and become true (and therefore peaceful) Islamists?

Please see also Coalition of the unwilling, US Gen. John Allen named to lead coalition war on ISIS, but allies deterred by Obama’s ambiguities, Turkey’s Frankenstein Monster and Obama, the Islamic State and Islam, the enemy which shall not be named.

“Moderate, vetted rebels”

As noted by Patrick Poole at PJ Tatler on September 13th in an article titled Yet Another US-Backed Syrian Rebel Group Makes Peace With ISIS,

Obama’s hopes to do anything of substance in Syria has taken another severe blow as the US-backed and armed Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF) has struck a peace deal with ISIS yesterday according to both Arabic and English language news reports. [Emphasis added.]

The SRF had only a few months ago been deemed by the US foreign policy establishment as “the West’s best fighting chance against Syria’s Islamist armies.”

Now AFP reports:

Syrian rebels and jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have agreed a non-aggression pact for the first time in a suburb of the capital Damascus, a monitoring group said on Friday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the ceasefire deal was agreed between ISIS and moderate and Islamist rebels in Hajar al-Aswad, south of the capital.

Under the deal, “the two parties will respect a truce until a final solution is found and they promise not to attack each other because they consider the principal enemy to be the Nussayri regime.”

Nussayri is a pejorative term for the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs.

According to the media reports other groups joining the ceasefire with ISIS include Liwa Ahrar Turkman al-Golan, Liwa Hittin & Liwa al-Umma al-Wahida.

As Congress takes up a bill to fund Obama’s plan to arm and train so-called “vetted moderate” Syrian rebels, even some analysts are beginning to admit that finding the right allies in Syria will be difficult. With the State Department’s disastrous record so far of identifying “vetted moderate” rebel groups who refuse to ally with Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and ISIS leaders openly bragging about the US arming and training rebels groups that have now defected to ISIS, some prudent caution on the part of Congress is in order before throwing more money and weapons into Syria and Iraq.

Conclusion

Obama claims to believe that Islam, like all other religions, rejects violence and those who use it. However, Christians, Jews and others neither torture nor behead infidels and apostates. The IS, et al, do that. Nor do Christians and Jews fight wars to force others to embrace their religions. The IS, et al, also do that. However, based on the words and actions of the United Nations against Israel, one might conclude that “Zionists” are worse than the Islamic State and its affiliates.

Is the legacy that Obama wants to leave behind when He vacates the White House one of peace through submission to Islam? It seems so, and far too many appear to react with apathy rather than alarm. Will there be enough time — and sufficient will — after He leaves office to pursue a policy of peace through victory? If not, Islam will continue to be violent and, most likely, will become even more violent than now.

Here, as a public service, is a video on how to behave during an Islamic massacre: