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Orgy of Guilt
The Islamic State, you have to acknowledge, is on quite a roll. Over the July 4th weekend, the FBI arrested a northern Virginia neighbor of mine, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh. He was apparently plotting a Fort Hood style attack and told an FBI informant: “I just want to live a good Muslim life and die as a Shaheed [martyr].”
Jalloh was thwarted, but around the globe, fellow admirers or members of ISIS have been inflicting chaos and death at an accelerating rate. Just in the past 24 months, ISIS-inspired killers have struck the Brussels airport, a Tunisian beach resort, the Istanbul airport, a Paris satirical magazine and a kosher market, a Christmas party in a San Bernardino office, a Russian plane flying over the Sinai, a restaurant catering to westerners in Bangladesh, Paris cafes and a concert venue, a nursing home in Yemen founded by Mother Teresa, and a gay nightclub in Orlando — to name but a small fraction of the hundreds of attacks. The list doesn’t count the horrific beheadings, sex slavery, forced labor, crucifixions, and other murders ISIS has committed in territory it controls in Iraq and Syria.
That such an orgy of viciousness attracts as well as repels is one of the mysteries of the human condition. There is little question though, that despite President Obama’s claims that “ISIL is contained,” the perception worldwide is that ISIS is successfully holding territory and expanding – thus earning the right to call itself a caliphate. For Muslims of a radical turn of mind, that is intoxicating.
You might suppose that in the mighty nations of the west, debate would be ongoing about how to destroy ISIS and rescue the desperate people – one thinks particularly of the religious minorities like the Yazidis – who’ve come under its control. You’d even suppose that people who style themselves human rights crusaders on the left would be condemning our inaction as a form of racism or xenophobia, since the overwhelming majority of ISIS’s victims are Muslim and/or dark skinned.
But no. In our counsels, the great issue we’re relitigating is whether Tony Blair should be tried for war crimes at the International Criminal Court and just how responsible George W. Bush was for all of the mayhem in the world. In the wake of a just-released prolix exercise in second-guessing by Sir John Chilcot, a sneering BBC host interviewed Blair and demanded to know whether “even now” he had the nerve to pray about his actions. (Blair, unlike most BBC types, is religious.)
Progressives, like those who run the BBC and the Democratic Party here, have concocted an imagined history of the past quarter century in which everything was fine until George W. Bush lied us into war in Iraq and opened the prison in Guantanamo. Those crimes, Democrats contend (and Donald Trump agrees), cost the lives of 4,497 Americans, killed at least 160,000 Iraqis, offended the Muslim world, destabilized the region, and led to the rise of ISIS.
The problem with this account is that jihadism predated Bush by decades. In the 1980s, they struck us in Lebanon, in Berlin (at a disco frequented by American servicemen), on the Achille Lauro, and in the air over Lockerbie. In the 1990s and early 2000s, they hit the Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and perpetrated the Mogadishu attacks and the first World Trade Center bombing. The 9/11 attacks obviously predated the Iraq War.
It requires small-minded malice to blame George W. Bush for attempting to protect the United States and its allies. Yes, he made mistakes in the Iraq War. Name an American war, or any war, that was flawless. Have you heard of Anzio or Market Garden? By 2009, when Obama took office, the Iraq war was won and the country mostly pacified. Just ask Joe Biden.
But beyond the political point scoring, there is something off about the Blame Bush First syndrome– namely, that we have now had 7½ years worth of experience with the opposite policies. Barack Obama has withdrawn from Iraq, declined to intervene in the Syrian civil war, kept inadequate forces in Afghanistan, denied defensive arms to Ukraine, sought rapprochement with Cuba and Iran, and stiff-armed Israel.
Where is the accounting for these policies? In Syria, 400,000 is a low estimate of the dead. Some 4.5 million Syrian refugees have fled to Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, and thousands are streaming into Europe creating a crisis for the EU. Half of Syria’s population (about 11 million people) is internally displaced and in need of humanitarian assistance, which is difficult to deliver in a war zone. As for ISIS, it has sprouted in the ungoverned regions of Iraq and Syria. The Iraq territory would have been denied them if the US had maintained a small force in the country.
Around the globe, jihadis see American diffidence as weakness. Some of the results are catalogued in the first paragraphs of this column. Other consequences are all too foreseeable. I await the BBC host who will ask Obama if he dares to pray.
Another one who doesn’t include the Tel-Aviv restaurant, stabbing a girl in her bed etc etc.
I thought this was going to be about the recent shootings by police.
Where can we find a highly-trained, high-tech and experienced military force on the ground in the Middle East which can quickly wipe out the forces of the Islamic State? A skilled army and air force, trained in desert warfare, whose soldiers are motivated and which because of its proximity would have few logistical problems?
I don’t know.
You know, if Barack Obama had a son he would look exactly like Mohamed Bailor Jalloh.
And the political will to stay there basically indefinitely…
And therein, lies the rub…
Mona, my sister heard on her local radio a story about a woman who was mayor or serving in local government and supposedly 20-30 Muslim men drove up on her lawn and declared Sharia – she called authorities – I found nothing about this story – she thought it might be Minneapolis? Bottom line is we have been asleep and our country has been changed under our noses – it’s serious – and our law enforcement, FBI and others have been silenced in doing their jobs in reporting or following up. A new book out on Flight 800 talks about it – we are at a Cross Roads here – we have accepted a Progressive Democratic Party to change the basic foundation of our country – what does that mean going forward?
Do it right and it takes three weeks.
America is not diffident. America is led by a traitor who is doing all that he can to promote jihad. We fail to admit this at our persistent peril. Hint: who is Hillar’s chief of staff going to be?
“I just want to live a good Muslim life and die as a Shaheed [martyr].”
Good for you. I want you to do that too. Somewhere else.
Actually it took the Bush administration exactly 60 days to eliminate the Taliban state in Operation Enduring Freedom.
It was done by providing generous arms and massive tactical air support to the Northern Alliance, allowing them to advance, and then landing relatively small US airmobile forces behind the Taliban to encircle them whenever they stopped their retreat to make a stand. The same tactics could be used to quickly destroy the ISIS state with the Kurds playing the part of the Northern Alliance. It could take a bit longer than 3 weeks, but not much longer than 10. It should have been done over a year ago. By refusing to do it, Obama has allowed ISIS to continue to murder thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of people. It’s completely crazy that we have allowed such a war against such a weak and completely vulnerable opponent to drag on for years.
Actually, I do know. The IDF.
Isn’t it amazing how people look right past the obvious answer?
The US is seven time zones and an ocean away from the ISIS heartland. We have sent troops into the Middle East twice in the last 15 years and managed to drain ourselves militarily, split our country politically, empower the most leftist and transnational president in our history and achieve only temporary territorial gains. But some commenters say “Do it again. It’ll be easy.”
Israel is less than 1,000 kilometers from the ISIS heartland. It, unlike the US, is directly threatened by the malignant growth of a virulently anti-Semitic caliphate. It has a splendid, well-trained and equipped high-tech army and air force. Israel is united in its belief in its own self-preservation and a commitment to Western values, two things ISIS wants to overturn.
But Israel’s partisans on Ricochet say, “America should do it.”
I guess “Start-Up Nation” will hold America’s coat while we fight the Jew-hating enemy that’s next door to them.