Obama’s pledge to “destroy” ISIS would have been more credible if it had come from the Ames, Iowa police chief, or the head of the Sacramento VFW. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for destroying these radioactive cockroaches – and the sooner the better, since they grow bolder and more numerous by the day. But even the police chief – and for that matter, the librarian, the PTA chairman in Tallahassee and the dog catcher in Turlock — know that we cannot hope to even hinder ISIS, much less destroy it, with air strikes alone. Leave it to our dangerously inept commander-in-chief to assure the enemy in advance that there will be no U.S. boots on the ground. Instead, Obama has purported to threaten them with an international coalition that in fact does not exist and which, even if
it did, would lack the take-no-prisoners mindset required to exterminate an enemy as savage as ISIS. More likely is that Obama’s politically calculated four-point plan will strike not fear, but contempt and disdain in the hearts of the enemy. It will soothe their febrile brains like poetry from the Rubaiyat, perhaps inspiring them to believe that planting ISIS’ flag on the roof of the White House is not such a crazy dream after all.
ISIS vs. Idaho Vigilantes
Many will have difficulty imagining how this could happen. Militarily speaking, it cannot. ISIS wouldn’t survive a confrontation with Idaho’s militia, much less a battle with U.S. troops. So how are they going to take the White House? Recall the details of 9/11 to read their psychopathic minds. ISIS will not fight its way down Pennsylvania Avenue; rather, it will use radiological or biochemical weapons to extinguish life across a wide swath of Virginia, Maryland and D.C. Then, when the dust has settled, the jihadis will plant their flag. However, let them behead just one U.S. soldier and that will be the end of ISIS. Americans are already spoiling for a fight after seeing two reporters decapitated. Do these guys even know about Pearl Harbor?
Some Americans, understandably tired of war, will object to confronting ISIS, especially with ground troops. But you can argue this only if: 1) you think they are just bluffing; or 2) you doubt their ability to hurt us. Because neither argument is very convincing, there’s a good case for going all-out to destroy them now, before they strengthen into a far more formidable and dangerous foe. The fact is, there are already enough jihadis scattered throughout the world to cripple every American company that does outside of the U.S., and to turn every American vacation oasis into a death zone. Although they have yet to blow up any suburban malls or detonate a radiological bomb in the heart of a large U.S. city, these evil goals are surely the stuff of their dreams. They will seem all the more realistic when Obama’s half-assed, four-point bluff flops as badly as virtually everything else the man has attempted since taking office. These are dangerous times to have someone who never worked above the level of community rabble-rouser in the White House. What would Obama’s mentor Saul Alinsky have done about ISIS? My guess is that he would have continued to underestimate them until the moment his head rolled onto the ground.
What is different, and what scares me about ISIS is a complete lack of a shred of empathy. They behead and execute with no conscience whatsoever. This group and its recruits from around the world would walk into a school and execute every child, women and men in the building for no reason other than inciting terror. How do you respond to this? The roots of disenfranchised people are deep in our existing societies both in the United States and here in Canada.
A response is required that must involve boots on the ground combined with Intel that identifies this behavior as it cruises the internet. I also agree that the middle east needs to step up and root this out of its backyard as well. This is a failure of the respective governments to provide adequate opportunity to their own people, and to society that has apparently worked to not properly instill a strong sense of ethics, responsibility and moral grounding to the next generation.
I don’t normally comment on this site but this to me represents a serious threat to all our democracies.