Posted tagged ‘Petraeus’

Ten Arabic Words: Bracken’s Challenge to National Security Professionals

May 20, 2016

Ten Arabic Words: Bracken’s Challenge to National Security Professionals, Gates of Vienna, May 20, 2016

(A good, strong and highly relevant analysis of our “Global War on Terrorism.” — DM)

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Ten Arabic Words: A challenge to national security professionals engaged in the Global War On Terror

by Matthew Bracken

If you are a politically-correct bliss-ninny with a coexist bumper sticker slapped on the back of your Subaru, and you don’t have the slightest clue what the following ten words mean, then this essay is not meant for you. You are excused.

dawah, dhimmi, hijra, jizya, kafir, shaheed, shariah, takfir, taqiyya, ummah

But if you are a national security professional, senior military officer or political leader involved in any aspect of the “Global War On Terror,” AKA “Countering Violent Extremism,” these are ten words that should already be a part of your working vocabulary. If you can’t readily discuss their meaning, significance, and relationships, then you are worse than a fool, you are disgrace to your office and a danger to your country.

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If you don’t already have a firm grasp of the meaning of these words, then you are as prepared to conduct the GWOT as President Obama’s “Pajama Boy” is prepared to fight a heavyweight MMA champion in a no-quarter steel-cage death match.

If you couldn’t accurately define at least eight out of the ten directly from your personal knowledge base, then as a national security professional, you are an abject failure. You are as dangerously ignorant as a parent who would send his ten-year-old son to a NAMBLA summer camp, because a friendly self-identified “Namblan” neighbor said it was like Boy Scout Camp, but even more fun, and completely free of charge.

In effect, you sent your innocent and vulnerable young son to a summer camp run by perverts, pedophiles and predators, and you didn’t even know it, because you couldn’t be bothered to learn the actual meaning of NAMBLA independently from your helpful Namblan neighbor. Sounds insane, doesn’t it? Nobody could be that stupid, right? Wrong. That level of stupidity is official Obama administration policy when it comes to fighting the GWOT.

So, if you are an Army general or Navy admiral who, right here and now, without looking at your smart phone, cannot discuss how a kafir becomes a dhimmi, and what a dhimmi’s rights and options (if any) are under shariah, then you are as ignorant of your job as an European-theater Army general circa 1942 who did not know a panzer from a pancake, or a schutzstaffel from a schnitzel. A person as ignorant as you should be kept away from any responsibility for protecting our nation. You are incompetent, and you are a fool.

If you don’t know how to determine when a Muslim suicide bomber is ashaheed and when he is a terrorist according to the shariah, then you are as dangerous to our national safety as a North Atlantic ship captain who believes that icebergs are a fairy tale concocted by conspiracy theorists. Full speed ahead, Captain Smith!

If you don’t know takfir from taqiyya, and can’t discuss the meaning and importance of both, you are as useless as a WW2 intelligence officer who didn’t know the Kriegsmarine from the Luftwaffe, (but who thought that one of them was a private flying club, based on conversations that he overheard among his ever-helpful German cleaning staff).

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If you cannot, right now, intelligently discuss the global ummah and its relationship to the OIC in the context of the GWOT, then you should be working for the Department of Parks and Recreation, and not the Department of Homeland Security. If you don’t know what the OIC refers to in this context, put on a dunce cap, and go stand in the corner. And if you don’t know whether your office is in the Dar al Islam or the Dar al Harb, please jump out of an upper-story window, and when you hit the sidewalk, ask any immigrant who is engaged in hijra. He’ll know the answer, even if you do not.

If you don’t know how dawah relates to jihad when faithful Muslims are engaged in long-term hijra, you should turn in your official credentials and take early retirement. You are as oblivious as a WW2 U.S. Army general who thought that the Geheime Staatspolizei were German motorcycle policemen much like our American state troopers, because a helpful German passer-by told him so.

If you don’t know what the three options are for a kafir who violates the shariah when living in the dar al Islam, then please get out of the national security business. If you don’t know why a dhimmi would care about jizya, please retire, and hand your duties over to someone who has the natural curiosity and personal integrity to conduct his own study of our actual enemies and their actual strategies. But in the meantime, you must immediately stop lapping up the false narrative being spoon-fed to you by hostile foreign agents, domestic traitors, useful idiots, and cowards who know better—but who won’t make waves while their pensions are beckoning.

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If your job is national security, and you didn’t score at least an eighty on the ten-word quiz, then you have obviously swallowed the big lie that we can safely delegate the understanding of our Islamist enemies to the WW2 equivalent of “moderate Nazis.” Sounds insane, doesn’t it? But under President Obama, this is indeed our national policy for fighting the GWOT: allow a range of Muslim Brotherhood front groups to conduct America’s narrowly limited analysis of so-called “radicalized Islam,” and thereafter guide our policies toward Islam and Muslims in general.

Here is an important example straight from current events. Please tell us, oh national security professional, whom has the United Nations delegated the critical task of selecting and “screening” the Muslim “refugees” who are currently arriving in the USA at the rate of thousands per month? Any guesses? It is the same organization that the Obama administration has also optimistically granted the authority to choose our new Muslim “refugee” immigrants. If you don’t know the answer, please get out of the national security business.

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So who is it? It’s the fifty-seven-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, which I referenced above. The mission of the OIC is to promote the spread of Islam across the globe until there is no moredar al harb, and all of the kafirs have either been converted to Islam, killed, or forced into submission as dhimmis. If you didn’t know, dhimmis are formally and legally subjugated second-class citizens who must pay the specialjizya tax as the price of their being allowed to live under shariah in theummah.

But this special offer is only extended to Christians and Jews: all others must choose between conversion to Islam, and the sword. That is, if their Muslim conquerors grant them the option of conversion. According to the Shariah, the defeated kafirs may also be killed or enslaved, if either of these two outcomes would be considered more beneficial to the ummah, based on local conditions and needs. (Of course, the captured women and girls may be taken as sex-slaves.) Mohammed did all of the above, and he commanded that these practices be continued in perpetuity, and they are.

The charter of the OIC puts Islamic shariah law ahead of secular law. This means, for example, that the official position of the OIC is that Muslims who leave the faith should be killed, and that any faithful Muslim who kills an apostate ex-Muslim has done no sin, but instead should be thanked and congratulated for the deed. It’s the same with adulterers: they should die, and killing an adulterer is no crime.

Yes, that really is their position, and they really do believe it, and much more than that. The OIC is made up of fifty-seven Muslim nations, united by a common belief in the supremacy of Islam, and their mutual obligation to conduct both dawah and jihad until the Dar al Islam covers the globe, and Allah’s eternal and immutable shariah has supplanted godless democracy and all manmade laws. This dawah includes the practice of using taqiyya when making arrangements or having negotiations with as-yet unsubmitted kafirs in the dar al harb.

So it’s no wonder that ninety-nine percent of the “refugees” being “screened” by the OIC and transported into the USA are Muslim, even though the Christians and other non-Muslims (who until recently made up over ten percent of the populations of Syria and Iraq) are suffering a brutal genocide and holocaust at the hands of Islamic State kidnappers, mass-rapists and mass-executioners.

The same OIC which is choosing our Muslim “refugees” is also strong-arming the European Union, the United States and the United Nations into acceptingshariah-compliant religious blasphemy laws, which will turn criticism of Islam into illegal “hate speech.” It’s worth noting that Bill and Hillary Clinton have collected millions of dollars in “speaking fees” and “donations” from OIC members, and perhaps unremarkably, Hillary Clinton also supports outlawing criticism of Islam, if the criticism leads to violence by Muslims.

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In light of this, it’s particularly sad to see disgraced former General David Petraeus heap even more shame upon himself, with his recent call for a mindless capitulation to Islamic extortion threats, extortion threats which have been ongoing against kafirs for 1,400 years. With fourteen centuries of history to examine, “Don’t make the Muslims angry, or they’ll run amok like uncontrollable sub-human savages, and kill lots of innocent people” is a wretched strategy for a former American general and intelligence agency director to espouse.

His call for the end of free speech rights anywhere and anytime that they “offend” Muslims is no different than warning a beaten wife not to anger her chronically abusive husband again, lest he give her yet another violent thrashing—which would then be entirely her fault. In fact, she should be punished again, just for provoking him after being warned not to!

This is not merely the heckler’s veto, which we are, sadly, familiar with today on the American college campus. This is the Muslim terrorist’s veto, and it means forced submission to Islam’s shariah law as the price of temporarily forestalling Muslim violence. Shame on David Petraeus for siding with the perpetrators of Islamic terrorism, and not the victims. But at least his motives are transparent: pure greed. Petraeus, who has no background in finance or economics, is making millions of dollars by hustling in Muslim nations for the multi-billion-dollar global hedge fund KKR. They want something for their money, and he gave it to them in his recent Washington Post column. (Read “Why David Petraeus really wants you to shut up about Islamism,” TheFederalist.com, May 18, 2016.)

Let me offer you another simple test that you may apply to your own national security work space and mission. If you have been ordered to purge the ten listed Arabic words (and others) from your official GWOT lexicon, and instead to hand over the task of analyzing “Islamic radicalism” to alleged “moderate Muslims,” then you are being played for a fool by our nation’s most implacable and devious enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Fifteen years after the twin towers came down, you have no excuse for such obliviousness. After the next 9-11, you will not be able to plead ignorance yet again. As a national security official, you have a duty to perform your own due diligence. You must educate yourself, and reject the politically-correct blindfold that you have been ordered to wrap around your own mind.

Sun Tzu wrote: “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

Today, we are literally outsourcing our intelligence analysis in the GWOT to the OIC and various Muslim Brotherhood front groups. Simply do a search for “Holy Land Foundation, Hamas, CAIR, and FBI” to begin your overdue education. Is it any wonder that the official “Countering Violent Extremism” narrative holds that there is utterly no connection between Islamic terrorism and Islam? That the Islamic State, which quotes chapter and verse of the Koran as justification for its every decision, is not Islamic? That Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Caliph of ISIS, who holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad, knows less about Islam than President Obama and his American-trained national security staff?

In 2016, ignorance of the reality of the Islamist threat is no longer an excuse. Many resources are readily available if you are willing to look unblinkingly at the light of truth. I would suggest the online video lectures given by Stephen Coughlin and Dr. Bill Warner as starting points. Those who need or desire to read an exhaustively researched (over a thousand footnotes) academic treatise on the present Islamist threat should carefully study Coughlin’s “Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.”

After 9-11, Mr. Coughlin was an acclaimed subject matter expert and frequent high-level lecturer at the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon, until 2008 when he was made persona-non-grata on federal property as an unwelcome “Islamophobe.” And who made the determination of Mr. Coughlin’s “Islamophobia?” The same Muslim Brotherhood front groups that our intelligence agencies now rely upon for their understanding of “violent extremism,” which, of course, we are assured has absolutely nothing to do with Islam.

We know this must be true, because President Obama has told us so. Unless, of course, he is practicing taqiyya on behalf of the ummah. Taqiyya is a bedrock principle of Islamic shariah, a ready tool for Muslims to use when they are dealing with kafirs. And not only radical Muslims, but ordinary, everyday, “moderate” Muslims. According to the shariah, it’s not a sin when a Muslim lies to a kafir in order to promote Islam. In that case, taqiyya is just a very clever form of dawah, helping to prepare the kafirs for the final Islamic jihad victory.

Now, go look up the Arabic words that you didn’t know, and read the article again, with fuller understanding. Then, go ask your colleagues how they did on the quiz. In the current threat environment, when mistakes are punished with passenger jets falling out of the sky, seventy is a failing grade for a trained and educated national security professional.

Please strive to do better. Your country is depending on you. Don’t let us down again. Educate yourself, and then prepare to stand firm against the prevailing winds of political correctness. Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Remember your core values, and stand tall against America’s enemies, both foreign and domestic.

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Matthew Bracken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and attended the University of Virginia, where he received a BA in Russian Studies and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1979. Later in that year he graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, and in 1983 he led a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut, Lebanon. Since then he’s been a welder, boat builder, charter captain, ocean sailor, essayist and novelist. He lives in Florida. Links to his short stories and essays may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com. For his previous essays, see the Matthew Bracken Archives.

Only Islam Can Save Us From Islam

May 18, 2016

Only Islam Can Save Us From Islam, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, May 18, 2016

Quran and Islam

In the Washington Post, Petraeus complained about the “inflammatory political discourse that has become far too common both at home and abroad against Muslims and Islam.” The former general warned that restricting Muslim immigration would “undermine our ability to defeat Islamist extremists by alienating and undermining the allies whose help we most need to win this fight: namely, Muslims.”

At Rutgers, Obama claimed that restricting Muslim immigration “would alienate the very communities at home and abroad who are our most important partners in the fight against violent extremism.”

If we alienate Muslims, who is going to help us fight Muslim terrorism?

You can see why Obama doesn’t mention Islamic terrorism in any way, shape or form. Once you drop the “I” word, then the argument is that you need Islam to fight Islam. And Muslims to fight Muslims.

This is bad enough in the Muslim world where we are told that we have to ally with the “moderate” Muslim governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to fight the Muslim terrorists whom they sponsor.

Petraeus has troublingly close ties to the Saudis. He defended their oil dumping program, praised the role of Islamic law in fighting Islamic terrorism and endorsed their Syria plans. While defending the Saudis as allies, he blamed Israel for America’s problems with the Muslim world. The narrative he was using there was the traditional Saudi one in which Israel, not Islam, is the source of the friction.

He defended Pakistan as an ally and claimed to believe the Pakistani excuses that they did not know Osama bin Laden was living right in their military center and that they really wanted to fight the Taliban.

Obama’s “partners” against “violent extremism” have included Muslim Brotherhood terror supporters at home and abroad. He backed Al Qaeda’s LIFG in Libya, Iran’s Shiite terror militias in Iraq, Al Qaeda allies in Syria and those are just a few of the worst examples of his partners against extremism.

Petraeus and Obama view terrorists and state sponsors of terror as important allies. Their policies have led to multiple terrorist attacks against Americans. And they still insist that we need Islamic terrorists as allies to protect us from Islamic terrorists. We need moderate theocrats to protect us from extremist theocrats. We need the Saudis and Pakistanis to save us from the terrorists whom they arm and fund.

But it’s Muslim immigration where their argument really shines.

The United States faces a terror threat because a certain percentage of the Muslim population will kill Americans. Every increase in the Muslim population also increases the number of potential terrorists. Muslim immigration increases the terrorism risk to Americans every single year.

These are undeniable facts.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Muslim populations are a hole. Immigration is the shovel. Dig deep enough and you’re six feet under.

Even if the mainstream narrative about a moderate majority and extremist minority were true, how could the cost of Islamic terrorism justify the expansion of even moderate Muslim communities?

9/11 cost us $3.3 trillion, over 10,000 dead, a national loss of privacy and traumas inflicted on millions. What could any number of moderate Muslims possibly contribute to outweigh all that? If it were a debt, it would take a thousand years to even begin balancing out those scales. And instead of trying to make amends, Muslim groups like CAIR and ISNA have waged a relentless campaign to undermine national security and defame Americans. They have refused to cooperate with law enforcement, defended terrorists and denounced America. These are our “moderate” partners.

But the Obama/Petraeus narrative about needing partners in Muslim communities in America implicitly concedes that Muslim communities at home, like the Saudis and Pakistanis abroad, create environments in which Islamic terrorists can safely operate. They admit the existence of Islamic no-go zones where the FBI and local law enforcement are ineffective so that we have to treat parts of Michigan or New Jersey like Pakistan or Iraq, trying to work with untrustworthy allies to gain intelligence on enemy territory.

We have to work with CAIR or ISNA, the way we do with the Saudis or Pakistanis, even though they’re untrustworthy, because they’re all we have in parts of America that have become enemy territory.

This argument is terrible enough in the Middle East. But it’s horrifying in the Midwest.

It’s bad enough that we sign off on “partners” who finance terrorists and then pretend to fight them in Syria or Afghanistan, do we really want to be doing this in Illinois or California?

The real problem, as Obama and Petraeus indirectly concede, is that Muslim communities create an ideal environment for Muslim terrorists. The last thing that we should be doing is building them up.

Even if Muslim communities were an asset, the Obama/Petraeus narrative is that they benefit us by helping us deal with the problems that they cause. The obvious question would be to wonder why we need them in the first place to help us cope with a problem that wouldn’t exist without them.

Obama insists that we need Muslim immigration so that Muslims will help us fight Muslim terror. But if we didn’t have Muslim immigration, we wouldn’t need Muslims to help us fight Muslim terrorism.

Muslim immigration isn’t a solution. It’s a problem posing as a solution. And we are told that we need to make the problem bigger in order to solve it. Muslim immigration has yet to reduce terrorism in any country. The increase in Muslim populations has not made Europe any safer. On the contrary, it has increased the risk of terrorism. The same is also true in Africa, Asia and across the Middle East.

The plan to reduce the risk of terrorism by increasing the Muslim population has failed around the world. Nor has it ever worked in the United States. What are the odds that it suddenly will now?

Building a counterterrorism strategy around creating more terrorism is not a strategy, it’s a suicide mission. Using Muslim immigration to fix a terrorism problem caused by Muslim immigration is like drilling a hole in a boat and then trying to plug it with water. Europe is sinking and if we don’t stop importing hundreds of thousands of Muslims, we’ll be facing the same problems that Europe does.

“It is precisely because the danger of Islamist extremism is so great that politicians here and abroad who toy with anti-Muslim bigotry must consider the effects of their rhetoric,” Petraeus insists. It’s a compelling argument, but not in the way that he thinks it is.

If Muslims can’t handle the full spectrum of argument, debate and namecalling that is a part of life in a free country without turning homicidal, then something has to go. According to Petraeus, it’s freedom of speech. According to others, it’s Muslim migration. Americans will have to decide whether they would rather have freedom of speech or Muslim immigration. Because even the advocates for Muslim migration are increasingly willing to admit that we can’t have both. The choice is ours.

Either we can hope that Islam will save us from Islam. And that Muslims will protect us from other Muslims. Or we can try to protect ourselves and save our lives and our freedoms from Islam.

Petraeus: Self-Censor To Avoid Offending Muslims

May 17, 2016

Petraeus: Self-Censor To Avoid Offending Muslims, PJ MediaRobert Spencer, May 17, 2016

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David Petraeus, the former director of the CIA and former commander of CENTCOM, published a piece in the Washington Post last Friday entitled “Anti-Muslim Bigotry Aids Islamist Terrorists.”

Wrote Petraeus:

[I am] increasingly concerned about inflammatory political discourse that has become far too common both at home and abroad against Muslims and Islam, including proposals from various quarters for blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion.

Petraeus’s target isn’t just Donald Trump’s proposed temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration. He is referring to all speech that some Muslims might find offensive, and this has sweeping and ominous implications.

Petraeus doesn’t just oppose what Trump now characterizes as “just a suggestion“ solely as a policy measure. Petraeus is saying that such proposals shouldn’t even be made; that just to speak them is damaging:

[T]he ramifications of such rhetoric could be very harmful — and lasting.

He feels simply speaking such thoughts may:

 … compound the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens.

How will these words do that? Well, you see:

[T]hose who flirt with hate speech against Muslims should realize they are playing directly into the hands of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The terrorists’ explicit hope has been to try to provoke a clash of civilizations — telling Muslims that the United States is at war with them and their religion. When Western politicians propose blanket discrimination against Islam, they bolster the terrorists’ propaganda.

Petraeus doesn’t offer any alternative suggestion as to how jihad terrorists can be prevented from entering the United States. He just doesn’t like Trump’s former proposal, and what he terms “hate speech against Muslims” in general, because he says it will enrage Muslims and make more of them join the jihad against America. So the upshot of Petraeus’ argument is that we must not say things to which Muslims might object, because this will just make more of them become jihadis.

His prescription for minimizing the jihad against the West is for the West to practice self-censorship in order to avoid offending Muslims.

Petraeus has done this before. When he headed up the international coalition in Afghanistan, he said this of Florida pastor Terry Jones’ plan to burn the Qur’an:

[It] was hateful, it was intolerant and it was extremely disrespectful and again, we condemn it in the strongest manner possible.

He warned that the Qur’an-burning would endanger American troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere. He issued a statement saying that he hoped:

 … the Afghan people understand that the actions of a small number of individuals, who have been extremely disrespectful to the holy Quran, are not representative of any of the countries of the international community who are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people.

I opposed the Qur’an-burning, but not for the reasons Petraeus did.

I don’t like the burning of books. And I’d rather that the contents of the Qur’an, and the ways that jihadists use those contents to justify violence, be known.

However, Jones was free to do what he wanted to do. Petraeus would have done better to have told the Afghans that in America we have freedom of speech and expression, and that we put up with speech and expression that we dislike without trying to kill the speaker.

He would have done better to tell them that their murderous rage over any burning of the Qur’an was an outrageous overreaction, and that bloodshed over such burnings was a heinous crime, far dwarfing any crime they thought Jones was committing.

The idea that in wartime one should be careful not to do anything that the enemy is likely to respond to with irrational and even murderous anger may seem tactically wise at first glance, but ultimately it is a recipe for surrender. One is already accepting the enemy’s worldview and perspective and working to accommodate it, instead of working on various fronts — not just the military one — to show why it is wrong and should be opposed.

Of course, to that Petraeus and his ilk would likely respond: “Well, we are not at war with Islam or the Qur’an, and so to burn the book is a needless provocation.”

This ignores, however, the war that the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and other Muslim groups are waging today against the freedom of expression. This also ignores the ways in which Islamic jihadists use the Qur’an to justify violence and win recruits.

Without approving of the burning, Petraeus should have defended Jones’ freedom of expression, and used the burning as a teaching moment in Afghanistan. Petraeus should have said:

We are going to defend our vision of society no matter what you bring against us. The U.S. will always defend American citizens who are exercising their Constitutional freedoms.

The OIC’s effort to compel the West into censoring itself regarding criticism of Islam is going very well.

In the wake of the jihad attack on our free speech event in Garland, Texas last year, there were widespread condemnations of our event for daring to “provoke” Muslims. After the Danish Muhammad cartoon riots and the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo Muhammad cartoonists, mainstream media outlets all over the West refused to publish the cartoons in solidarity with the victims and in defense of the freedom of speech. Instead, they opted to publish transparently hypocritical explanations of how they were declining to publish the cartoons out of “respect” for Muslims and Islam.

The lesson of all this is one that no less a figure than General Petraeus has imbibed and is now propagating himself: Muslims don’t like when we say we should stop Muslim immigration for awhile, and they join the jihad. So we must stop saying it so that they won’t join the jihad.

In reality, this argument will only encourage them to tell us they’re joining the jihad because of other things we do, because they now have proof this tactic works. They are in fact already doing this. In the wake of violent intimidation by Muslims, Petraeus is saying that the West’s proper response is to give those violent Muslims what they want. Conform our speech to suit them.

If we take Petraeus’ advice, it will not result in less jihad, as he claims, but more. More aggressive Muslim demands on the U.S., more rage, and more “revenge.” Petraeus is giving the West a recipe for setting the world on fire even more than it is now.

Petraeus: Fight Against Islamic State ‘Inadequate’

September 22, 2015

Petraeus: Fight Against Islamic State ‘Inadequate’

BY:
September 22, 2015 2:37 pm

Source: Petraeus: Fight Against Islamic State ‘Inadequate’

Retired Gen. and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus testified Tuesday that U.S. progress against the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS) terrorist group has been “inadequate.”

“It has been more than a year since the U.S. commenced military action against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” Petraeus said to the Senate Armed Services Committee. “While there have been significant accomplishments, the progress achieved thus far has been inadequate.

The U.S. has carried out thousands of air strikes against IS as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, but the terrorist group shows no signs of retreating.

“In Iraq we have halted and reversed ISIS’s momentum in some areas, but we have seen gains by ISIS in others such as Ramadi,” Petraeus said.

Petraeus said that “some elements of the right strategy” to defeat IS are being utilized by the U.S., but that “several are under-resourced while others are missing.”

Petraeus recommended ramping up U.S. military support for its allies in the area, notably the Iraqi Security Forces and Kurdish Peshmerga. He also recommended embedding U.S. advisors behind the front lines in Iraqi brigades, coordinating airstrikes more closely with Iraqi coalition partners, and broadening the rules of engagement to carry out airstrikes against IS targets.

Petraeus stopped short of recommending the deployment of U.S. troops for combat roles before a “viable” force of Iraqi partners was available to hold onto the areas taken back from IS.

Petraeus’s testimony can be added to a litany of bad news about U.S. progress against IS, although the White House had until recently characterized the fight as successful.

Retired Marine Gen. John Allen, who created the anti-IS coalition, will step down in November after struggling with the White House for control of the war, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Last week, Gen. Lloyd Austin, the U.S.’s top commander of Middle East operations, admitted the failure of a program to train and equip moderate rebels to fight IS in Syria.

Hanging over these revelations are serious allegations that senior U.S. officials manipulated intelligence on IS to hide its strength, lending credence to the White House’s narrative that Inherent Resolve was working.