No Answer to Terrorism

Bin Laden's latest message, real or memorex, is an uncomfortable reminder for the current ruling party of the United States that terrorism did not go away just because they found it inconvenient or thought global warming was a much more crucial threat. Like every terrorist Bin Laden does not measure victory against a much stronger enemy in terms of strategic assaults, but in terms of staying power. And so Bin Laden's message to Obama is a very simple one. "I am still here. The Mujahadeen are still here. What are you going to do about it?"

Naturally Obama has no answer. His self-proclaimed experience with the Muslim world, and the supposed diplomatic polish that a new administration could bring to the table, have yielded nothing in the way of real world results. Instead after nearly a year of ignoring the War on Terror, Obama was forced to trot out a plan reminiscent of the Bush Administration (to the hisses and boos of the nutroots and his media backers) that was little more than a patriotic smiley face stamped on an obvious exit strategy.

While the Taliban are moving forward with plans for a struggle with the Afghani coalition government once the Allies have withdrawn, Washington D.C. has failed to show that it can even plan more than a year ahead, or address any unexpected contingencies. Napolitano's fumbling response to the Northwest bomber or the Army's extremely politically correct report on the Fort Hood Massacre that managed to perpetuate the very causes of the massacre by ignoring Hassan's Islamofascist beliefs have managed to frustrate even true believers who were waiting for Obama to show that his administration could deftly manage the challenges of global and domestic terrorism.

But the truth is that Obama and his people have no idea what to do with a domestic terrorist who can't be linked to their political opposition, and no idea what to do with global terrorists except the same old "throw money at the moderates" strategy. Islamic Terrorism is off the table and Muslim terrorists have made a career of taunting us about it. Nidal Malik Hasan did everything but send a warning telegram to the Pentagon, and got a free pass for the worst of his antics. Not simply because doctors were needed, but because the mythical moderate Muslim has become one of the most prized creatures in the West, even if he is threatening to cut your head off.

The flip side of the meme "We're not at War with Islam" is the compulsive need to disguise any manifestations of such a war by dressing up our window displays with tokens of our love and affection for Islam, whether it's Koran lessons, Eid fasts for everyone or moderate Muslims who get up and moderately inform everyone that maybe the Taliban thugs trying to murder our soldiers might have a point or two there. And so we censor cartoons that offend Muslims, we pay lip service to the peacefulness of the Koran, the greatness of Mohammed and the general wonderfulness of anything green with a sword and crescent on it. We do everything we can to convince the Wonderful World of Islam that not only don't we have a single negative thought about them, but that we actually love and respect them very much. And while we may have failed to convince a single Muslim of our sincerity, we have done a fantastic job of convincing ourselves (Stockholm Syndrome case study #44317).

So fervently do we believe that we are not fighting a war with Islam (heavens no) that we tune out Muslims, on either side of the board, who tell us that yes our war is with Islam. Because if we were to listen to them, then we might have to deal with the implications of what they're telling us.

It's so much easier for the media and the political establishment to listen to the latest Bin Laden tape and cherry pick enough of his propaganda to reinforce whatever it is they already want to believe about the War on Terror, whether that it's the fault of our foreign policy, of globalism or the sock hop (one of the excuses given by the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayed Qutb, a perfectly lovely organization that would help birth both Al Queda and Hamas).

Never mind that the Bin Laden messages are propaganda meant to reinforce existing domestic anti-war propaganda. Never mind that Bin Laden is probably dead and his messages are being hacked together by a bunch of call center employees in Lahore in between answering calls from American consumers who want to know why their toaster isn't working. (Hello my name is Baree, you must press the red button before the green button. That is all.) What matters is that the cocoon of denial remain intact for the dreaming butterflies, imagining a world in which the UN takes care of the world's problems.

Because Islamic terrorism is an extremely inconvenient phenomenon to the globalist who can already see the fall of nations and their replacement by a vast enlightened global bureaucracy that will end hunger, bring world peace and make sure that every school in the world looks like something out of a Benetton ad.

If European politicians at least generally understand that what they're doing is destroying their own nations in the long run for short term political gain, American liberal politicians are still fiercely certain that the future will be big one of glassy transparent domes and an enlightened world body of regulators to tell everyone what to do and what to think, ensuring that no one is ever fat or disagrees with government policy. The rise of Islam has no place in this wonderful universe in which everyone has an iPhone and no one votes Republican. It is so out of place that it can only be dealt with by integrating it as another thing that America itself caused by being mean to other countries and which will go away once we have enough glassy transparent domes and inspirational speakers for everyone.

Obama was supposed to fix terrorism, not by dropping bombs on terrorists (Gaia forbid). No, he was supposed to fix terrorism by being inspirational, by uplifting the world's imagination with a new vision of human togetherness and showing that America is no longer a mean country that conquers other countries, but a country where anyone can become anything, so long as they first write a heartfelt biography about it.

Instead Obama has been forced to drop bombs and deploy troops. And all his inspirational speeches didn't inspire the Turks to stop sharpening their knives, the Europeans to contribute more troops, the Russians to stop stirring the pot, the Chinese to stop polluting, the Israelis to put a gun to their own heads, the Palestinian Arabs to agree to let the Israelis commit suicide, the Pakistanis and the Saudis to stop playing both sides at the same time, the Afghani and Iraqi governments to actually work, the Iranians to stop trying to melt down the entire region and the Colombians to stop fighting leftist terror. And after a while, even his die hards began complaining that his speeches just weren't inspiring anymore. But the speeches hadn't changed, they just began to ring hollow. Because it was all too clear now that speeches weren't going to get anything done.

Unlike Obama, Al Queda does not rely on speeches. Like most murderers, their speeches amount to a barely coherent string of rationalizations mostly meant to confuse their victims and the authorities. And like most terrorists, Al Queda relies on inflicting terror and then hanging back and waiting for the sleeping giant to exhaust itself before going back to sleep again. Obama's election was America hitting the snooze button on terrorism, as the independent voters decided that it was time to give the beanbag party a shot at running the country. And now Al Queda is back with a vengeance, kicking us when we're down, because 2008 showed that we had forgotten everything we should have learned in 2001.

What terrorists do is very simple. They inflict terror on the one hand and hold out a political solution on the other. The Nazis did it well enough to convince everyone that everyone would be better off with them in power. Arafat did it well enough to convince everyone but the Israelis that the only way to end terrorism would be to put him in power. Eventually the mass pressure and the rise of the Israeli left convinced the Israelis too. And that is the next stage of Al Queda's gambit, to convince Obama that he would be better off negotiating with them, and letting them have Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Yemen or Afghanistan, or any other part of the world that would fit nicely into their Caliphate.

And can you really count on Obama, facing a tough reelection campaign a few years from now to say no? Al Queda isn't and they win either way. When the Russians wanted to leave Afghanistan, they had to cut a deal with the very people they had been fighting first. If Obama wants a clean getaway withdrawal from Afghanistan, without the images of women jumping to their death trying to accompany the departing US troops or Taliban shells landing on US airfields, then he's going to have to cut a deal. The Taliban and Al Queda know it, even if Obama's crack team in D.C. still hasn't figured it out.

But that's because our enemies have what is most vital to winning a war, a plan for actually winning it. The US government never has. Not under Bush and certainly not under Osama bin Biden, whose cosmopolitan skill set of visiting other countries as a kid did not remotely prepare him playing in the international bloodsport arena of foreign affairs. And the reason we don't have that plan is because we haven't even defined who the enemy is.

Our entire hundred billion dollar security apparatus still doesn't know or refuses to say, what every junior level Taliban fighter does, that this is a war between Civilization and Islam. And only one of them can emerge victorious. Either the West will harness its great advantages of technology, resources and brainpower to crush the extremist cult of throat-slitters, or the Ummah will utilize their wealth and surplus of young males, as well as their knowledge of our political and cultural weaknesses, to overrun and destroy us nation by nation. Al Queda's terrorists are only the forerunners in this great war. They know it, and we don't.

How can we win a war when we won't even define who we're fighting. The lead up to and the aftermath of the Fort Hood Massacre is a tragic demonstration of what the greatest military in the world fighting blind, wrapped in a blindfold of denial, looks like. And though our dearest paid experts refuse to see it, our enemies suffer from no such handicap. As long as we can't define what we're fighting, then we have no answer to terrorism, except to huddle together for comfort and be as defensive and reactive as we can be after every successful or unsuccessful terrorist operation.

No answer to terrorism, oh we have an answer. We're ignoring it, until we can't ignore it anymore, and then we shout a lot, make loud threatening noises and wait for it to go away, so we can go back to ignoring it again. And we throw money at any terrorist willing to pinkie swear that he will go home to his wives and adorable children, be a good moderate Muslim and practice terrorism no more. That's our plan. Is it any wonder we're losing?

We can win, but first we have to fight. We can win, but first we have to know who the enemy is. We can win, but first we have to take off the handcuffs, toss away the blindfold and take the safety off. Imagine if US soldiers had spent the Cold War learning about the wonders of Das Kapital and the Communist way of life. Imagine if during WW2, Bundists worked freely in the defense establishment and Charles Lindbergh was the President of the United States. Imagine if we went into every war insisting that we were not fighting the enemy, but a tiny minuscule minority of their extremists. Imagine if respect for Das Kapital and Mein Kampf had been taught to every US soldier. Imagine it? Why we're living it right now.

We can win, but first we have to start fighting back.