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4/23/13, "When America Is Weak, Its Enemies Attack," Daniel Greenfield, FrontPageMag
"On September 12, 2012, Obama stepped out into the Rose Garden and
told the millions of Americans watching at home, “We will not waver in
our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And
make no mistake, justice will be done.”
More than half a year has passed since then and justice is nowhere in
sight. The perpetrators of the attack openly walk the streets of
Benghazi
long after the FBI team sent there has gone home.
It may well be a coincidence that the first major successful terrorist
attack [aside from the 2009 Ft. Hood terrorist slaughter of 13 unarmed US service personnel] comes as the administration plots a withdrawal from its second
lost war. The Boston marathon massacre may have succeeded by a simple
roll of the dice. Or it may have inaugurated a new series of terrorist
attacks on the homefront.
For over a decade, Islamic terrorists who wanted to kill Americans
headed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Obama’s grand security plan was to
replace boots on the ground with drones carrying out pinprick strikes
and then flying away again. It was a comfortable technocratic vision but
it doesn’t account for what happens to all those fighters on the ground
with no one left to fight and no reason to stick around except to act
as drone targets.
Some have headed for Syria and others for North Africa. But the big
question is how long will it be until they make another serious pass at
the United States? Or have they made it already?
In Libya, Obama tried to avoid casualties by bombing from the air
under the guise of a No Fly Zone. But once Gaddafi was dead and the zone
was down, nothing protected the Americans in Benghazi. Obama had used
the United Nations to sanction regime change, but without its sanction
or the sanction of the Arab League, he refused to use air power to scare
away the Salafist militias besieging the trapped Americans.
The new soft power strategy was big picture. It had nothing to offer the
Americans fighting and dying while waiting for help to arrive.
Al Qaeda understood soft power as a weakness....
“We will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers
who attacked our people,” Obama announced in the Rose Garden and the
terrorists laughed. They laughed because they had support from within
the Libyan government. They laughed because the Libyan government had
obstructed the arrival of rescue teams and denied the use of armed
drones over Libyan airspace.
What sounded like a reasonable statement to an American audience was
actually an admission that Obama would not act unilaterally to go after
the killers. There would be no Abbottabad style raids. There was no
reason to worry that they would wake up to find the Navy SEALS coming
down on them.
Obama had been unwilling to flout the authority of the Libyan
government to rescue the Americans in Benghazi. He was certainly not
going to do it to find their killers.
The Jihadists had carefully assessed Obama’s weaknesses while
searching for loopholes to exploit. In Afghanistan, the Taliban had
outplayed him by refusing to negotiate.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood
had outplayed him by claiming the mandate of the people. Iran had
outplayed him by prolonging meaningless negotiations. Al Qaeda had
outplayed him by using that same reliance on the meaningless formalities
of international law.
Before the Boston bombing, Guantanamo Bay was in a virtual state of
revolt with prisoners refusing to move to individual cells and covering
up security cameras and windows to take control of sections of the
prison. While some imprisoned terrorists staged hunger strikes, others
wielded broomsticks and batons in clashes with guards.
In Guantanamo Bay, in Benghazi and Afghanistan and Mali and a hundred
other places, the Jihadists were testing the nerve of their infidel
opponents and probing for weaknesses. Weak opponents can be hemmed in by
their own laws and hamstrung by their need to cling to the moral high
ground. The greatest weapon of the terrorists is their ability to
exploit our rules, leaving us unable to act....
When Obama spoke in the Rose Garden on September 12, all he had to
offer were worthless words spewed from a teleprompter. On April 15, he
delivered much the same speech, with entire sentences seemingly lifted
from the original. Once again there were vows of justice, tributes to
the American spirit and all the other formalities of an administration
covering up its failures with heaps of words.
The media cheers every one of Obama’s utterances, as do the Jihadists, but where the media sees strength, they see weakness.
The Taliban won in Afghanistan. The Muslim Brotherhood won in Egypt.
Al Qaeda won in Benghazi. And they don’t intend to rest on their
laurels. Whether or not the surviving Boston bomber was one of theirs,
the old war that was put on hold when American troops went to fight in
Iraq and Afghanistan is about to go hot again as Al Qaeda franchises
gain the spare resources and breathing room to develop and deploy the
next generation of terrorist plots....
They have exploited the weakness of our leaders in Afghanistan, Egypt
and Libya. And they intend to exploit that weakness on American soil."...
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Ed. note: This isn't only about Obama, GOP "leadership" is equally counterproductive whether Bush crowd neo-con types or everyday hacks. Neo-cons are defined as social liberals who fervently believe in destroying the US and its people by transferring their earnings to the weapons industry and by killing American soldiers for no reason.
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